Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms

These vibrant scraps of ancient text reverberate with intimations of the immediate present, and Haxton's poetry, in response, is fresh, funny, and tender. In the pain of doubt, and even in the burlesque of irreverence, he explores the mystery of our abiding passion for the sacred.

In this book of homemade psalms, Brooks Haxton brings the poetry of the original psalmists, their awe and their music, into our world of jet planes and space travel, automatic rifles and suburban pleasures. The result is lucid, touching verse that connects the exalted language of scripture with everyday experience. In a poem called Dark, for example, Haxton riffs on the gorgeous line The night also is thine (Psalm 74) as he stands on his front stoop on a particularly black night. Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures (Psalm 36) brings forth a poem about the perilous joy of bodysurfing. And his response to Psalm 58, The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance, becomes a poem about Westmoreland in Vietnam.

These vibrant scraps of ancient text reverberate with intimations of the immediate present, and Haxton's poetry, in response, is fresh, funny, and tender. In the pain of doubt, and even in the burlesque of irreverence, he explores the mystery of our abiding passion for the sacred.

Brooks Haxton is the son of novelist Ellen Douglas and composer Kenneth Haxton. He has published two book-length narrative poems, four previous collections of poetry, and translations of Victor Hugo, Heraclitus, and selected poems from the ancient Greek. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He lives with his wife and three children in Syracuse, New York, and teaches at the Syracuse University Program in Creative Writing and the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers.