Review (PDF) I Hope It's Not Over And Good-by: Selected Poems Of Everette Maddox

                
              
Review (PDF) 
I Hope It's Not Over And Good-by: Selected Poems Of Everette Maddox
Andrei Codrescu calls Everette Maddox the Christ of New Orleans. Editor Ralph Adamo has brought his critical eye to bear on the work and selected the best from the published collections as well as many poems uncollected to date. This is Maddox's first publication by a major press. Adamo's interesting selection and thematic ordering of the poems puts them in a new light; even the most famous of them acquire new dimensions from his innovative arrangement.
Paperback: 166 pages
Publisher: University of New Orleans Press (November 16, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608010007
ISBN-13: 978-1608010004
Product Dimensions:  5.7 x 0.5 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
Average Customer Review:  5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)   #374 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > European > Spanish   #6491 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > United States   #118397 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States
There are one or two things you need to know about Everette Maddox. One is that he was born in Alabama, and got his MFA at the University. The other was despite this, he was, and will always be, a New Orleans poet.Everette Maddox was a man who was dying as fast as his body would let him, and working to speed up it's time table. "Don't Say it's Over and Goodbye" is available in both the ethereal Kindle Edition and in print. I don't know what Maddox would make of that. After all, what is immortality to a man who courted his own destruction with such passionate fervor?I suppose it is of little matter. What is of importance is the lives that he touched in his brief sojourn, or perhaps stagger on this earth. He was a poet in full. I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of one of his former students some years ago who said of Maddox, "he didn't just write poetry, he was poetry." This collection is the finest, for that matter the only remaining, evidence of this fact.This collection is a chronicle of a man locked in the struggle with his own inescapable humanity and the pain, beauty, and humor that goes along with it. Read Maddox's words and be astounded.Maddox is one of the most important voices in Southern letters, and his works should be celebrated, canonized, and on the lips of every student of Southern Literature.
The tragedy of Maddox' early death is overshadowed only by his relative obscurity now. He was, in my opinion, one of the brightest and most original American writers of the 20th century. I hope the reissue of some of his work will lead more people to discover the joy of reading his work.
Everette Maddox did not only write poems, he lived an on-going continuous poem. He really lived and died for poetry. Every word he spoke was tinged with electric poetic impulse. He truely followed his muse, a muse who led him to his end even though it was a sad and pitiful end, penniless, sick, down, and finally out. I had forgotten how good his poems were until I had this wonderful chance to go back and see older work from his University of Alabama days when he had poems in The New Yorker and Paris Review, alongside his poems from American Waste and others set in New Orleans and those written in his final days at the Maple Leaf. I thought of the poems of Billy Collins, poems anyone can "get" and enjoy, not just for what they say, but for the wonderful and simple way they are said. No one who had the good fortune to know him will ever forget him, and we carry a love for him that continues to dance like the flame of a votive candle inside, deep in the very places from where all poetry comes, a flame as delightful and as vulnerable and sad as Everette Maddox himself was.
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