HEMINGWAY: A Desperate Life highlights the fascinating, sometimes incredible, feats and follies of a great writer who often ould not distinguish between facts and fantasy, truth and braggadocio. David Ray’s poetic sequence counterpoints lyric and narrative, major and minor modes of amusement, admiration, and astonishment in beholding Hemingway’s Falstaffian posturings as well as his sufferings. Scenes from the four marriages are set against a backdrop of alcoholism, accidents and injuries, mental illness, and a complex involvement in both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. In the end, the poems express compassion for the “desperate life” of this “larger-than-life” personality.
Another biography of Ernest Hemingway? Yes, and no.
The sequence of poems in David Ray’s latest book, HEMINGWAY: A Desperate Life, highlights the facinating, sometimes incredible, feats and follies of a great writer who often could not distinguish between facts and fantasy, truth and braggadocio. The poems do not attempt to cover all the drama, travels, and output of the famous novelist, yet they provide vivid glimpses of scenes from the four marriages set against a backdrop of alcoholism, accidents and injuries, mental illness, and a complex involvement in both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War.
This is David Ray’s twenty-first book of poetry. Most of the previous volumes, some of which have received national awards, have offered a wide variety of topics between their covers. Others have focused on a theme, such as elegies for a son inSam’s Book; experience of living in other countries and cultures in The Maharani’s New Wall (India), Wool Highways (New Zealand), and Kangaroo Paws (Australia); the Holocaust in One Thousand Years; and outrage and protest in The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars.