C.G. Hanzlicek won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985 for his "Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimire Holan".
C.G. Hanzlicek received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and a M.F.A. from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1986. He is the author of seven books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry)
The Cave: Selected and New Poems covers 25 years of poetry by C.G.
Hanzlicek, and shows how he honed his ear to the rhythms of
everyday spech and the natural world.-- "Dennis Loy Johnson"
C. G. Hanzlicek has been writing a visionary, unsettling poetry of
need for several decades. With its short, narrative pacing, his
poetry addresses many individuals as it reminds the speaker about
the limits of human time. His life in California is a world of vast
landscapes and political realities, where the mystery of a land
under pressure is the stage for poetic wonder and absolution. To
have a major poetry press gather Hanzlicek's work is an encouraging
sign that our choices as readers have expanded.-- "The Bloomsbury
Review"
Charles Hanzlicek's The Cave: Selected and New Poems, is poetry
with an intuitive feel for the world of seas and high meadows, for
hawks, lizards, people, and places filled with what poet James
Wright once called "the genius of place.' These luminous,
ruminative poems speak to us as directly as fresh wind with the
power to measure human endeavor, communal aspiration, and
individual despair. These are welcome, memorable poems,
courage-built and always crafty, funny and wry, and deeply loving.
Who could want more?-- "The Southern Review"
For over two decades C.G. Hanzlicek has been writing poems that
speak to us of 'the seen world' and the morally ambiguous
circumstances in which ordinary people encounter it. The Cave:
Selected and New Poems offers us the best of this work, andf it is
both a delight and a revelatiion. Whether writing about intimate
one-way conversations with Mahler or the simple act of scrambling
an egg for his daugher or the death of a close friend, Hanzlicek
has the power to surprise in us a conviction that 'in the end,
beyond the metaphors, / We can't help loving life.' A poet who can
do this needs to be read.-- "Peter Everwine"
One feels everywhere the hurry and press of time passing in C. G.
Hanzlicek's The Cave. The tick of a man's life, the turning of a
day, the haste and waste of the seasons--time is the central
designate in these first lines and opening gestures; as throughout
the book, time becomes a measure, like a meter, of dignity and
loss, and of language unfolding. From the original site, the
Ur-cave, of Hanzlicek's vision to his most contemporary settings,
we follow the accrual of damages, the 'parings, ' the 'blind
wishes' that seem so bleak or weak. But damages, if outlived, may
yield wisdom. Here then is the amazement of an old man who 'made
it'; here too, 'like a gift from the gods, ' is hope and song. The
Cave is a severe, beautiful harrowing--of line and form, of self,
and of a body of work. It is an exacting selection of poems, most
fit and most fine.-- "David Baker"
Reading these poems is like taking a long walk with a friend.
Enjoyable, and at times enlightening.-- "Virginia Quarterly
Review"
Those who know C.G. Hanzlicek's work will be pleased the
representative if severe selection of past poems. Those who are
unfamilar with his writing will find that fully a third of The
Cave: Selected and New Poems is new. The new work, in particular,
recommends the poet's strengths: honesty, clarity, humor, and a
singular gift for a natural and personable spoken idiom almost
forgotten in contemporary poetry culture committed to the langauge
of artifice. Hanzlicek's ear perfects not only his voice but the
heart it listens to.-- "Stanley Plumly"
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