Get Up, Please: Poems

by David Kirby

In comical and complex poems, David Kirby examines our extraordinarily human condition through the lens of our ordinary daily lives. These keenly observant poems range from the streets of India, Russia, Turkey, and Port Arthur, Texas, to the imaginations of fellow poets Keats and Rilke, and to ruminations on the mundane side of life via the imperfect sandwich.

Whether remembering girls' singing groups of the 1950s or recounting a child asking his priest if his dog would go to heaven, Kirby has the ability to make us laugh, but he can also bring us to tears through our laughter.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2016

About the author

David Kirby (born 1944) is an American poet and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University (FSU).

Kirby has published over 20 books, including collections of poetry, and literary criticism. His new and selected poetry collection, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press), was nominated for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His work has won numerous awards, including four Pushcart Prizes, the James Dickey Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Kirby obtained his Ph.D. in 1969 from Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife and fellow poet Barbara Hamby in Tallahassee, Florida.

Reviews

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Kirby has been a huge influence on me as a poet: I took workshops with him in my first go-around at grad school, his work has always been meaningful to me, and he blurbed my book. I've been a fan for years.

So that's the context in which I say: this book is probably my favorite thing he's ever written. It is rich, touching, funny, smart, memorable, meaningful. It reminds me of Bob Hicok's Elegy Owed, which is in my top five poetry collections ever. I don't know if I'd call these poems elegies, exactly, but there's that mournfulness here, a deep awareness of mortality and the shortness of our time here on this planet -- but it's not merely sad, it's also celebratory in the way the best elegies are and must be. Grief and joy braid together in the lines of this book, inseparable:

... My own feet have touched
the earth nearly three times as long as Keats's did,
and I'm hardly the oldest person
I know. So let this poem brush across the feet of anyone
who reads it. Poetry is
my religion -- well, I wouldn't die for it. I'd live for it, though.

(Note: the formatting here loses the trademark Kirby indentations, so you lose a sense of how the words ebb and flow down the page. Trust me, it looks better in the original form.)

There are so many great poems in this exuberant book, so many moments where I had to stop reading and sit with the lines I'd just read. In typical Kirby fashion, the poems meander and rollick through history, art, literature, music. These poems exist in the world and are unafraid to be specific and idiosyncratic. Among my favorites (which is really basically all of 'em): "Let's Take Off," "I Had a Girl" and the book's final poem, "Gnurszk."

[Michael Brockley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I celebrated being half-way through my Goodreads challenge by reading David Kirby's "get up, please", another stellar collection of humorous, erudite constellations that combine rock-and-roll, the blues, philosophy, divergent quotes that reveal themselves as whatever the plural of mot juste is, and the poet's great and mythic optimism. If on,y there were an elixir de Kirby, a champagne or cognac that I could drink so that I might believe these clothes will reek deliciously of sex once more. I know this. While I was reading Nematodes, the second to last last poem, I kept hoping the last section of poems would unfold like a dozen centerfolds at the end. And I've promised myself a vacation to Gnürszk later this summer.

[Roxanne]

I made it to page 44 of 88 while reading someone else's copy of this book at AWP in February 2017. I really, really liked it, so I left the status as "currently reading", hoping that would remind me to go pick up my own copy - but I haven't yet done that, so marking as "unfinished" for now. I really do want to read the whole thing, I remember being really impressed by what I did read.

[Katie J Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part personal journal and part history book, Get Up, Please: Poems by David Kirby is a true testament to the interwoven nature of humanity.

Read my full-length review in Issue 16.1 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley: http://www.semopress.com/bigmuddy

Also, since the cover art isn't on Goodreads, I had to include it. It's just so fantastic.



Five Stars: This book was positively amazing and I will aggressively recommend it to everyone.

[David Eves · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I found two or three of the poems in this collection a little too formulaic and reliant on Kirby's own scrapbook-narrative style. Still, most of them are zippy, fun, deep, accessible, deeply accessible little texts that have Kirby at the top of his game (while maybe riding a pogo stick for a couple of extra feet).

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Kirby came to SLC to read in February. He is a great reader of his poems and just as nice and chatty in person as you might imagine, having read his poems.
I love the voice of his poems, and the talkativeness. I love how his poems leap from idea to idea but stitch them all together with ideas and images.
I love many of his poems, and this book has some new great ones.
I have enjoyed reading one or two poems every morning as I drink my coffee.