Imperative to Spare
Imperative to Spare is the first installment of a trilogy in which Hightower seeks to explore diplomacies of the heart. He puts an altruistic human face on suffering and awe. The overall poetic voice is that of the lone surviving wandererin the landscape of grief and loss… missives from bereavement in the wasteland. By design, nothing is meant to last forever.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe as we can always create more of it.
The poems sample diverse literary styles. His work is a mix of Callimachus, Rumi, William Blake, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, H.D., T.S. Eliot, and Anne Sexton.
Poems shift in tone from the casual familiar to the literary (ekphrastic guide, voices of biblical or pagan characters, shepherds, etc.). In emotional content there are discants of Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu, Achilles mourning Patroclus, Job wrinkling his rhetoric to his Lord, David mourning Saul and Jonathan, Alexander mourning Hephaestion, the white cue ball disappearing into the darkness of a pool table pocket.
The manuscript is divided into four sections. It evokes images ranging from Ariadne, Sampson, The Good Samaritan, New Testament Mary
in her flight to Egypt, to Scarlett O’Hara and Christopher Isherwood’s George Falconer in A Single Man: “If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”
SCOTT HIGHTOWER is the author of four books of poetry in the US. He has published two bilingual collections in Spain. A third, Contracted/Contraído is forthcoming from ELENVÉS EDITORAS in Granada. He is also the editor of the bi-lingual (English/Spanish) poetry anthology 2012 Women Rowing: Mujeres A Los Remos, Mantis Editores, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Hightower’s awards include a Hayden Carruth Book Award and a Barnstone Translation Prize. Originally from Texas, he has itinerantly sojourned in India, Italy, Spain, and now lives in Manhattan where he teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
