The dead are never far from the living in Patmos, the end is always nigh, and the cultural symptoms of denial and reconciliation, unresolved shame and loneliness, remain just beneath the surface: "It is how, these many / years, we survived. In our rooms, alone, at the end of time." In this book-length poetic sequence, Bruce Bond explores the psychology of endings as a living presence that haunts our spiritual, moral, and ecological imaginations, elevates its summons, and draws us to question its significance. The horrors and glories in the revelations of John of Patmos provide a lens into a wound, a crisis of values, a longing to heal a visionary brokenness that is fundamentally solitary and yet contemporary, written against a door that will not open.
Bruce Bond's Patmos is composed of quietly contained octets, bound together as a single elegantly clear-eyed and elegiac poem. Like the visions of John the Revelator (exiled to the island of Patmos), Bond's lines conjure cinematic glimpses of end-times. They invoke a sublime mythic reckoning ('The sea will lift into the sky and take with it its mirror'), while evincing the intimately human moment ('the fly at the window, the bored child'). Patmos is wonderfully lucid and compelling, meditative, and vital, an astringently balanced music.'—James Haug, author of Riverain
BRUCE BOND is the author of twenty-six books including, most recently, Dear Reader, Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods, Frankenstein's Children, Words Written Against the Walls of the City, Scar, Behemoth, and The Calling, and his work has appeared in seven editions of Best American Poetry. Presently, Bond is Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.
