The Destroyer in the Glass

by Noah Warren, Carl Phillips (Foreword by)

Overview

Winner of the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize
 
Noah Warren’s brilliant collection of poetry, The Destroyer in the Glass, is the 110th recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Warren explores universal themes of isolation and the desire for human connection in a series of tightly crystallized poems that question the damage we have done—to ourselves and to others—in the pursuit of knowledge and a stable idea of who we are. Balancing a tendency toward form, rhyme, and allusion with a freer, expressive style, this exceptional young poet charts the development of the self through, by, and in language.
 
Since 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets has launched the careers of poets as esteemed and varied as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Robert Hass. Judge Carl Phillips praises The Destroyer in the Glass for “its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300217148
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2016
Series:	Yale Series of Younger Poets , #110
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Noah Warren was born in Nova Scotia and received his BA from Yale University. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Yale Review, Missouri Review, and AGNI. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Carl Phillips is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books of poetry and a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020.

Table of Contents

Foreword Carl Phillips ix

To the Book 1

I

Like the Pelican 5

After Du Fu 7

Cut Lilies 8

La Dolce Vita 10

Thereafter 12

Holt Hill 13

New Vintage Stereo 14

Two Apostrophes to the Requiem 15

Dream of the Hunt 17

Helplessly Baroque, My Soul 18

If We Are to Go Forward 20

II Alterations

A Bought Scene 23

The Deep Tourist 24

My M.V. 26

The Problem Bear 28

Quad 30

Child in the Yard 32

Thou in Time 34

The Derelict 36

III Ab Ovo

A Beginning 39

The Tines 40

Milkweed 41

Our City Center 42

Barcelona: Implication 44

In the Cloisters 46

A Problematic Relationship 47

Then the Animals Move Slowly 49

IV

Mosaic of a Dog in Crete 53

Holt Hill 55

Helsingør 56

Wavering, Changing 59

Resort Town 61

Flood 62

Enduring Pleasures 64

Automatic Pool Cleaner 71

Empathy 73

On the Levee 75

River Path 82

Across from the Winter Palace 84

Acknowledgments 85

Editorial Reviews

03/21/2016
Warren, winner of the 2015 Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, exhibits a restless curiosity as he explores the lightness that comes with accepting uncertainty in this collection of largely pastoral lyric poems. He writes of finding comfort in the unknown, the unsustainability of isolation, and the distinct forms that loneliness can take. The poems are lithe and fluid, rhythmic and pointed. Warren’s alluring syntax underscores his own claims to being “helplessly Baroque”: “So winter blooms, hot, stark—/ three black notes,/ you, me, this, float/ together from the ark// revolving.” His economy of language, along with his keen use of enjambment, signals an aptitude for constraint and restraint. Warren can also charm, as with evocations of deep images such as “a vast Adirondack/ day/ drifts overhead like cold lake, the archaic spruce/ shudder./ (Mark my stoic indifference.)” But while his skill is evident, such passages can feel overwrought: “wary we touch/ fingertips and as our tongues/ meet strung nerves thrum and the sea’s lungs/ boom our chord—a clutch// of heart in teeth—now hollower notes—/ listen.” Nevertheless, Warren offers a raw and piercing vision: “I study to live my death well./ Through the chilly forest,// my mind ravens on ahead/ of my life// like a silent, monstrous bulldozer/ chased by a chariot with bells.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly