Copies of Immortal for Quite Some Time arrived late last week from the Chicago distribution center. That means they are available through various sources. You can order from your neighborhood bookstore, from the University of Utah Press, and from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. Here is the book’s website if you’d like to see some photos and read some responses to the book.
Linda Jones Gibbs wrote to me after reading the book and mentioned a poem I hadn’t known. It beautiful expresses what I was trying to accomplish with my writing, “Brother of a brother”:
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them in not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight
it goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 