Avenue

"Moving with penetrating attention through avenues of cityscape and dreamscape, Michael O'Brien's poem is a cartography of experience, inner and outer—splendors and vanishing points, snapshots, aphorisms, brief lives, the discarded ideograms of history, the eerily suspended clarities retrieved by memory—ordered by the syntactic music of a rare intelligence."—Geoffrey O'Brien

About the Author :
Michael O'Brien (1939-2016) was born and raised in Granville, New York, and lived thereafter in New York City; studied at Fordham, the University of Paris, and Columbia; worked as a librarian; was one of the Eventorium poets, where his first book was published in 1967; taught at Brooklyn and Hunter; worked for many years editing technical publications; wrote The Summer Poems, Conversations at the West End, Blue Springs, Veil, Hard Rain, The Floor and the Breath, Seventeen Songs, Sills: Selected Poems 1960-1999, Six Poems, Sleeping and Waking, Avenue, and To the River.

Review :
"O'Brien continues to work in modes where accuracy comes first--each poem feels like a careful effort at clarity. His verse is mimetic before it is anything else. And yet his poems stick in the memory because they speak not just to optics but to phenomenology, not just to how things look but to how we can feel."--Stephanie Burt, Boston Review "The record of looking and searching in Avenue carries the marks of a lifetime's discernment on both sides of our waking life. Although he dives deep into the heart of things, O'Brien refuses to wear the persona of the elder sage . . . At its core, his slender book remains true to the etymological origins of the word avenue: a way of access, a means of approach. Avenue is a thoroughfare of phenomena ever approaching, ever receding -- a map of the compressed extravagance revealed in the 'show of the world / when act is suspended.'"--James Gibbons, Hyperallergic "There are no titles, no named characters (beyond a 'he' and a 'she, ' that might be the same individuals or not, that might reappear or not). The poems can be read from front to back, or back to front, or in any direction, in one sitting or one poem quietly at a time. Like the action of tightening or focusing a photographic lens, we can, in a moment, see a landscape large and then immediately flash to another scene for a pinpoint of particular. A cellphone can mesh on the same page with a blade of dune grass. We accept a description of a forest next to the E train moving towards West 4th, without the images or our senses ever clashing. Graffito. Cyclamen. Where street (St.) can read like saint (St.). The gentleness of gesture, and flux of the poems allows for a wide acceptance and our trust."--Elisabeth Whitehead, Drunken Boat "O'Brien is primarily an observer rather than a debater, and the poems here are heavy on isolated images, dream logic, bits of overheard conversation (typically urban conversation) and memories, with larger themes emerging through juxtapositions and repetitions . . . O'Brien is an assured technician who excels at any line length (including the prose poem), but whose favorite structure is the relatively short, steeply enjambed free verse line first perfected by William Carlos Williams."--David Orr, The New York Times