Immediate Song

From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world.

Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago.

Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

Praise for Immediate Song

“The poems in Immediate Song are clear, perfect stanzas containing interior music, a man’s conscience, and his crystal reflections.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“From its stunning long poem “On Hospitals,” to its unflinching view of life “in the twilight of empire,” to its quiet, deft, and subtly lyrical “song” poems, Immediate Song is at once an extended elegy, a meditation on time, and a hard-won articulation of the largeness of small moments. Simultaneously ambitious and understated, these poems are unmistakably of today’s America, even as they mine the timeless concerns of loss and memory. Bogen is a brilliant and singular poet—wise yet unassuming, sharp yet unpretentious—with much to teach us about the complexities of living in the world.” —Wayne Miller, author of We the Jury