The Bunker in the Parsley Fields (Iowa Poetry Prize Series) - Tapa blanda

The Bunker in the Parsley Fields takes its cues from the particular music made by an old-fashioned rope swing; from a child ramming a trike over and over against a bomb shelter that is in the way; from a boy bouncing a ball off abandoned chinchilla hutches; from a man and a woman pushing a tremendous stone up a hill, lost between the slope and their shoulders - and once, in the orchard, lost in laughter. Many of the poems, including the title poem, come from the year that Gary Gildner lived in Slovakia. It was 1992-93, when Czechoslovakia split in two, a year of heightened excitement and uncertainty. Gildner and his wife lived in a cement box of a flat like thousands of others cheek by jowl above an abandoned bunker not far from the Tatra Mountains. They returned to a new home in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains, with Elizabeth expecting a child. The ideas of home, settlement, birth, rebirth, the past, the future, direction, luck, what matters, love, and work flow through the poems that shape this book.

Gary Gildner is a nationally recognized poet and writer, whose books include "Somewhere Geese are Flying", "Blue Like the Heavens", "The Second Bridge", and "The Warsaw Sparks". He has received the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes; Gary was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to both Poland and Czechoslovakia. Gildner lives in Idaho s Clearwater Mountains.