The
Geometry of Loneliness, Poems by Lee Passarella
The
Geometry of Loneliness is a hauntingly lyrical collection by Lee Passarella.
Passarella's songs map out the shapes that loneliness can take, and the shapes
of human connections that can push back against "the coming blankness,/that
long dry spell in the marrow."
Sample Poems by Lee Passarella
"Lee Passarella's The Geometry of Loneliness
is a deeply intelligent and deeply human book. Its central tension, drama,
what makes it powerful, is in the metaphor of its title: to try to give some order
to the business of the heart is a wild and difficult task at which Passarella
succeeds frequently and brilliantly.î--Thomas Lux
"Lee Passarella is a master of the ekphrastic poem, particularly poems about
music, the art which despite (or perhaps because of) its close kinship to poetry
is hardest for poetry to contain. Melodies and harmonies cannot be described as
directly as images. He approaches this difficult subject in a variety of oblique
ways: details of the lives of composers (the moving 'Dvorak and the Crows'), deft
metaphors from notation ('bar lines always return / stark, self-sufficient, and
unbreached'), and by an almost scientific observation of music's effect on the
soul, as Archimedes measured the volume of water by its displacement. 'Tonight,
air and music / have the same atomic weight,' he asserts. In 'On Beethoven's Harp
Quartet' he addresses the strong emotions released by music at a double remove--'music
becomes sculpture and sculpture comes alive' leading us via the tangent of Pygmalion
to the discovery that 'The best marriages / aren't made in heaven after all."--A.E.
Stallings
"What a surprise this new book is! I think I might have called it Mirrors and Windows, after two particular
favorites of mine. These fine poems are indeed windows into a discerning mind
that has felt and thought long about what it means to be a lover of Handel and
Schumann in the age of the postmodern pop-cultural paradigm shift, and they are,
indeed, polished mirrors to show us back ourselves as well."--Leon Stokesbury
Lee Passarella works as senior technical writer for a major producer of accounting
software. He also teaches English at Georgia Perimeter College and acts as senior
literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine. Passarella received a Ph.D. in English
from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia, with
wife Candace. Passarella. His poetry has appeared in Chelsea,
Cream City Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Mediphors, The Literary Review,
Journal of the American Medical Association, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Snake
Nation Review, Slant, Tar River Poetry, The Louisville Review, and many
other periodicals.Swallowed up in Victory,
a long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White
Mane Books in 2002.
ISBN: 1933456396, 108 pages, $17.00