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“Peter Campion’s new book of poems, The Lions, is as ferocious as it is memorable. These elegant passionate poems explore the way we live now in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.… In lines traditional and free, bracingly fresh and unpredictable, Campion affirms the value of intimate affection even while showing the frailty of such affection in a time of war. Campion is a first rate poet, and this is a first rate book.”
Alan Shapiro

“Like George Oppen’s, Peter Campion’s poems not only inhabit but create the space where the single soul collides with the roiling world. Should the poet ‘hold some ground against the surge’ or ‘carve a life’ from it? Campion won’t answer this question-not only because it cannot be answered but because he knows that poetry is itself a questioning, a refusal of ready hierarchies, a love-affair with tremor and noise.… The Lions is an alarming, beautiful book.”
James Longenbach

The Lions

Peter Campion

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge “to carve a space” for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara, then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In The Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

Peter Campion is assistant professor of English at Auburn University, editor of Literary Imagination, and a recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of Other People, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Peter Campion is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Lindsay Dawson at (773) 702-1964 or ldawson@press.uchicago.edu

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