Tony Whedon Livres

The poems in The Très Riches Heures probe what is shown and, just as interesting, what is not shown in these late medieval miniatures – what is merely suggested or even left out. With precise, vivid detail they explore the complex sweetness and nostalgia along with the grim realities for peasants and the coming collapse of the feudal order. Tony Whedon takes us inside and back out for the long view of an era at the cusp of our modern world.—David Cavanagh, author of Straddle and Cycling in Plato's Cave**In these twelve poems Tony Whedon, along with the Limbourg brothers of the early 15th century, gives us a world—one both bounded and boundless. Whedon's imaginative associations are as dazzling as the colors of the miniatures themselves. Both the elegant lightness and the earthiness of the Limbourgs' artistry are reflected in these poems. Beyond brocaded nobility, beyond agrarian quaintness, the richness of Whedon's poetry can convince you that the world of the paintings is one in which we still live.—Judith Yarnall, Author of The Transformations of Circe

Set against the backdrop of remote islands and a Nova Scotia fishing town, this collection of narrative poems explores themes of love, memory, and the struggle to escape the past. Characters navigate their relationships while embarking on misguided journeys, revealing the interplay between geographical and spiritual distances. The blend of formal and free verse creates a poignant atmosphere, capturing the complexities of human connections and the inevitability of memory.

Tony Whedon's new book The Hatcheck Girl vividly describes border crossings where language, culture and states of consciousness collide. In these richly layered poems about jazz most of the musicians we meet are sidemen: few are famous, most are notorious. They're united, as he says in his opening poem "The Tradition of the New," by their devotion to the music and by their appetite for a note, a phrase to "make it new . . . over and over." Whedon is a poet of historical juxtaposition: in "The Peacocks" we meet both trumpet player Chet Baker and Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio on a lonely beach outside Naples. In "Head Wound" Whedon's narrator, an expat jazz musician who's suffered a head wound in WW II France, contemplates the beauty of late-14th Century illuminated manuscripts. Some poems in The Hatcheck Girl feature women - Whedon's opera singer sister dying of cirrhosis in Manhattan, an aging torch singer in Jacksonville, a young, green female pianist in Paris - struggling to survive in a male-dominated art form. Others depict the lives of musicians who scuffle for gigs in out-of-way clubs because they both love the music and don't know what else to do. Robert Pinsky has praised Tony Whedon's "masterful verbal music," and in The Hatcheck Girl Whedon, a jazz trombonist, is in command of the medium. His new collection is full of brilliant improvisational surprises.

“Sometimes,” Tony Whedon tells us in his brilliant new book, Drunk in the Woods , “I think there's such a thing as an alcoholic landscape.” With such clarity Whedon tells of his close-to-the-bone experiences of gardening, cutting wood, and exploring the back country of northern Vermont woven into a lively, sometimes harrowing personal narrative, providing a fresh perspective on how “living wild” impinges on the mind of the suffering-and-then recovering alcoholic.    For much of his life, Whedon lived off-the-grid with his wife in a one-room cabin suffering in winter darkness and spring floods, drinking heavily and then making a go of it in recovery. An introductory chapter sets the tone for Drunk in the Woods . The Chinese poetry tradition of the sage tipsy on too much wine and too much Nature is evoked in “Form, Shadow, Spirit.” The book’s main themes―the darks and lights of backwoods loneliness, the transcendent clarity that drinking and sobering up in the woods provides―are developed here.    The book proceeds with thoughtful chapters on Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwinfolded into meditations on birds of the northern forest, animal tracks, and the metaphysics ofsobriety.