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    Laughter Before Sleep
    Laughter Before Sleep
    Laughter Before Sleep
    Ebook155 pages1 hour

    Laughter Before Sleep

    By Robert Pack

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    About this ebook

    One of America’s most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, Laughter Before Sleep, Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music.

    Laughter Before Sleep weighs the nature of endings from the perspective of old age and embraces the humor and play of memory that keep mortality at bay.As we are carried along with Pack’s lyrical, sensitive, and intelligent verse, he takes us on a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life. In the opening section, Pack composes poems that meditate upon a sense of his own diminishing and the meaning of absences. The middle sections form episodes of a memoir in verse, moving from family to history and back again, reflecting on the power of anecdote to shape a life in retrospect. With the final section, Pack recalls his unfulfilled plan to raise penguins in Montana, offers a panegyric on Darwin’s nose, and makes the mistake of trying to impress a police officer with a book of poems.   Filled with charm and wit but also with philosophical melancholy, Laughter Before Sleep is a superb addition to the poet’s oeuvre.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2011
    ISBN9780226644202
    Laughter Before Sleep
    Author

    Robert Pack

    Robert Pack was born in New York in 1929. He taught at Middlebury College and for more than twenty years he served as Director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. After retirement he taught in the University of Montana’s Honors College. During his career Pack published twenty-one collections of poetry and three book-length studies of poets. He died in June, 2023.

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