Call Waiting

Ward David C.

David C. Ward's first full-length poetry collection combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America – its landscapes, its history, its politics. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives, from Andy Warhol or Weldon Kees ("Case closed. / No body was ever found") to Ward's own father, playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 USA and its self-deceptions.

About the Author

David C. Ward is a Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of "Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic" (2004) and (with Jonathan D. Katz) "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" (2010). His exhibition "Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets" opened at the NPG in Autumn 2012. His pamphlet of poems "Internal Difference" was published by Lintott Press in 2011 and his verse was anthologised in "New Poetries V" (Carcanet, 2011).

Reviews

"These graceful, powerful poems catch the reader's attention at every turn. Memories of family, flashbacks of place and deft images of civic life grow through craft and music into powerful self-questionings about purpose, mortality and even art itself. This is a memorable and moving book and these are poems to savour and re-read" – Eavan Boland

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