Poetry | Soft cover | 114 Pages | $18
This collection of poems was written under the influence of jazz, Shakespeare, Basquiat, boxing, the Bronx and the Basque country. The poems are more Coltrane-like riff than meditation, unable to keep their verbal dexterity still, even for a second. His first book at age 60, the oxymoronic Harry Bauld sees in all directions at once, with his blissfully uncorrected eye.
Praise for The Uncorrected Eye
Like the woodpecker in this collection’s first poem, Bauld pecks away in a “paradiddle of discovery,” a jazz take on the joy and pain of contemporary life as he observes it. Fathers and sons, fading youth, marriage, learning Spanish, Basquiat, the teaching of nuns, the lives of monks comprise only some of the objects of his roving imagination. The Uncorrected Eye gives us a fresh view of life with new and bracing insights.
Jo Sarzotti, Mother Desert
What is the “uncorrected eye” that Harry Bauld celebrates? This uncorrected eye, he writes, reveals a world that “brims, marbles, quivers / over its boundaries, wells.” And that is what his poems do. From his jazz-like improvisations to the whip-like turns in his sonnets, from his ‘magic cloud of memory’ to the “limping lion of history,” Bauld presents us with a world we thought we knew well. Now, in these beautifully crafted poems, we feel as though we are meeting it for the first time.
Fred Marchant, Said Not Said
About the Author
Harry Bauld studied art history at Columbia University, where he was twice All-Ivy shortstop and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. Unfortunately they were his academic records. As a freelance journalist his beats included sports, the arts, wine and food, and book reviews. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies and won the New Millennium Writings Award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize. Selected by Matthew Dickman for inclusion in Best New Poets 2012 (University of Virginia Press), he has taught English and coached baseball, boxing and basketball in New York and New England. He currently holds the Kulik Chair in English at Horace Mann School and spends summers in the Basque Country.