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Sat 09 Sep 2010Timely missives from the laureate of failure
POETRY:The God of Loneliness: Selected and New PoemsBy Philip Schultz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 194pp. $25
PHILIP SCHULTZ is an American poet who won a Pulitzer Prize for his sixth book of poetry, Failure, in 2008, 30 years after his first collection, Like Wings, appeared. He is held up as a laureate of failure – “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair” – and many of his poems revolve around a sense of disappointment and loss. In this way he speaks, as championed by Tony Hoagland and, even more surprisingly, by the former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, for a people who have seen a notional sense of the American dream turned into a more realistic nightmare.
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