Washington University Press, 2005 and 2008
The Cartographer’s Melancholy
WINNER OF THE 2004 SPOKANE PRIZE FOR POETRY
Fate, stillness, travel and the deep bruise of history as it become political history all shape this new book from David Axelrod. In a language extraordinarily lean and fresh, Axelrod shows what it would be like to be truly alive to the nuance of events, structures, and the declarations of those who are in or out of power. This is an unusual and moving book.
“‘Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ Keats asked in a letter to his family.
David Axelrod in The Cartographer’s Melancholy maps that pilgrimage. He follows the refugee road with its transcendence, resignation, and dark dramatic histories, and within each poem he makes the important discoveries, the ones that counterpoise suffering against the world’s beauty.”
“[Axelrod’s poems are] a moving journey into a landscape where we are all pilgrims making our way down dark roads in search of some transcendent moment that may never occur, yet the will to keep traveling impels us ever forward until we reach a kind of solace and release. ”