The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976 - 2006 by Hans Ostrom
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: December 2005
- Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing, LLC
- Format: Paperback, 204pp
- ISBN-13: 9781598581027
- ISBN: 1598581023
Synopsis
The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom, is a rich collection of poetry on a broad range of subjects. Some poems are set in and concern Ostrom's native region, the High Sierra of California; others are set in Sweden, Russia, Italy, Spain, and Germany. "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven," an award-winning, much republished poem, was featured in the "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post as well as in the popular anthology Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free.
Hans Ostrom was born and grew up in a small town in California's High Sierra. Ostrom attended high school and community college in the Central Valley of California before enrolling at the University of California, Davis, where he earned a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in literature. There he studied writing with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro. Ostrom's poems have been appearing in journals, magazines, and anthologies for three decades, and they have won several prizes. Currently professor of English at the University of Puget Sound, Ostrom has taught at Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has also worked as a journalist, an editor, and a laborer. Ostrom has written, co-written, edited, and co-edited numerous works, including Three To Get Ready (a novel), Subjects Apprehended: Poems, Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction, A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia, Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively (written with Wendy Bishop and Katharine Haake), and the five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature(edited with J. David Macey). Ostrom lives in the South Puget Sound region with his wife and son.
"Reading Hans Ostrom's poems the second time, one wants to read them a third time and more. This is the test of poetry, after which no other test applies. It is not only the memorability of the voice in its quiet assurance but the introduction of a new experience that make the reader want to return and to see and hear again. The range is geographically immense but the persona remains intact and rooted in its time and place, the poet of Scandinavian descent in the new American west. At home in nature and at home among handicrafts, at home in the academy and in far-flung places: one has an image of a Paul Bunyan-and Rilke! Here is genuine American poetry at its best."
~Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Customer Reviews
Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976 - 2006by Anonymous
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April 09, 2006: The Coast Starlight is a collection of poetry by Hans Ostrom, who is the chair of the English Department at the University of Puget Sound. This is Ostrom's twelfth book. His previous works include the novel Three to Get Ready, Subjects Apprehended, which is another collection of poetry, and Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, an acclaimed, multi-genre bible of writing guides and prompts. The Coast Starlight contains a total of 156 poems. I enjoyed reading them very much. Ostrom's poetry is observant and thoughtful. 'Tacoma Blues' captures the funky atmosphere around Tacoma, Washington. Rain comes down constantly. Birds wear miners' lamps. Rich people visit just to laugh at you. Your relatives drive through without stopping. 'Hick' is a character study of a man who eats too fast, walks too slowly, hangs on to old things, and watches the entitled with an inexplicable fascination. There is a large presence of nature throughout the collection, too. Poems like 'Hurricane Season,' 'Tornado in the Pennsylvania Hills,' and 'Fox and You' deal with the relationship between nature and humans (among other things, nature keeps an encyclopedia on you, as revealed in the last poem of that list). The poetry is also imaginative. Emily Dickinson meets Elvis Presley in Heaven in one poem. They get along just fine. Emily teaches Elvis about half rhymes. Elvis puts Emily's poems to song. Also paired in Heaven (in other poems): Jack Benny and T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire and Richard Brautigan, Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth...Freud watches Babe's butt, and gets discontented whenever Babe breaks wind and belches. He would. Other food for the imagination: poems like 'Career,' which throws a twist in the saying, 'He worked at a company for years.' And 'Whereabouts Unknown,' in which Einstein's theory of relativity becomes key in defining the narrator's relationships. Finally, the poems are often full of wit and humor. The premise of 'Peaceheads:' powers in the world have started an arms race collecting, well, peaceheads, and the threat of worldwide peace grows larger by the day. 'Permission to Treat the Witness as Hostile' contains a very logical linguistic argument about why the narrator can't tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. And 'Social Interaction' gives a very good reason as to why you should sometimes turn around and say hello to that stranger walking behind you. Reading The Coast Starlight reminds me of hanging with a friend I had in middle school, named Zac. I remember Zac because he was a heck of a lot more observant than me (Ever notice how Mr M----- just swings his knees directly into the opening underneath his desk whenever he sits down?), had a much more active imagination (I wonder what would happen if we flipped his desk around, to put the plywood front of the desk where the opening should be?), and had a great sense of humor, to boot (Let's do it!). I enjoyed stuff like that. Liked hanging around him. Liked the times I spent with him. Same goes for Ostrom's book
Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976 - 2006by Anonymous
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January 17, 2006: Poetry can sometimes seem out of touch for people with simple thoughts. Hans Ostrom has a unique way of expressing the intensity and complexities of life in ways that can connect to everyone's perceptions of the world. He observes the world from all angles, turns it upside down and backwards, and then brings clarity where little existed before.
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