Home and Variations

Poems

In Home and Variations, Robert Archambeau masterfully explores themes of displacement, both literal and metaphorical. His poems often adapt European poetics to an American setting, as demonstrated in "Two Short Films on the Translation of the European Imagination to America" and "Experimental Researches on the Irrational Embellishment of Chicago." Textual raiding and splicing, particularly evident in "Citation Suite," blend sources from David Bowie to William Blake, creating a hybrid and dynamic literary landscape. Satirical elements shine through, especially in the sharp critique of the nineties academic left in "In Elsinore." The collection's longer poems embrace experimental forms, while traditional structures like the sonnet showcase their enduring resilience and adaptability.

Salt Pub; 1st Ed. edition
June 1, 2004
116 pages

Praise for Home and Variations

Robert Archambeau’s new collection belongs to a species nearly extinct today: the poetry of serious wit. Whether memorializing the “victory over the sun” of the Russian Futurists, or submitting Vermeer’s View of Delft to elegant ekphrastic variations, or slyly sending up the academic left in his deliciously nasty “In Elsinore,” Archambeau has perfect pitch. Home and Variations will leave you smiling with admiration at its author's inventiveness.

—Marjorie Perloff

Home and Variations is an impressive first book of poetry and an important one. A great deal of contemporary poetry struggles between the conventionally Romantic, forever warm first-person singular and the somewhat shop-worn, post-modern inter-textual no-person plural. Archambeau chooses instead an informed poetic discourse which examines and judges. There are poems here that examine the curious life of European aesthetics in American soil and others that play at received texts with grace and insight. Out of a sense of cultural (and national) displacement Home and Variations manages an unexpected, literate poise. For Archambeau, clearly, poetry is an activity involving speculation, investigation and wit, a space where history, text, high culture, myth and the contemporary popular flotsam can be seen together, played and played at. These poems are relentlessly smart and engaging, wry, surprising and occasionally wickedly satiric.

—Michael Anania