In his collection Gold Bee, Bruce Bond takes his cue from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, bringing a finely honed talent to classic poetic questions concerning music, the march of progress, and the relationship between reality and the imagination. Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary “The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels.” At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond’s poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths. Addressing broadly ranging topics—from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad’s wind machine—Bond’s voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has “the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.”
Author
Bruce Bond is the author of eight previous books of poetry including, most recently, Choir of the Wells (Etruscan Press, 2012), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (Finalist, The Poets Prize; LSU, 2008). After receiving degrees in English from Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School, Bruce Bond earned his MA in Music Performance from Lamont School of Music. For several years then he worked as a classical and jazz musician in Colorado, after which he went on to receive his PhD in English from the University of Denver. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Raritan, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly, Poetry, and many other journals, and he has received numerous honors including fellowships from the NEA, Texas Commission on the Arts, The Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, and other organizations. Presently he is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.
