Vault by Bruce Bond, and Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas, was selected by Mark Irwin for the 2022 Richard Snyder Prize—a melodic composition of emotionally complex poetry. Prize Winner Bruce Bond is the author of over 37 books his work has been featured in numerous journals including seven appearances in Best American Poetry. He is a professional musician with 40 years of experience, combining natural musicality in this haunting collection.
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-two books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Scar (Etruscan, 2020), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), and Liberation of Dissonance (Nicholas Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner Press, 2022). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry. Presently he is Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
"One writes what one must write, but if I could choose to write like any of my contemporaries, I would choose to write like Bruce Bond. His fecundity! His seemingly effortless lyricism! But a poet's effortlessness must reward a reader's effort or it is of no worth, and the poems in Vault reward the reader again and again, interlocking more tightly, echoing through each other more thoroughly with each re-reading. This is a marvelous book." — Shane McCrae, Poet and Poetry Editor of Image.
"Here are six meditations on loss, the horrors of history and the threat of the future, on the vagaries of memory, the instability of the self, and the motions of time, where 'the world was a book blown open by wind and the eyes inside the cattle car ask who bears witness.' The poetry here is not merely skillful. Rather it accomplishes what so few books do: it casts a spell that feels at once emotionally intimate, complex, and even profound. Vault is a true achievement." — Kevin Prufer, Author and Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
"Gravid, lucid in its stillness and haunting music, Vault is a symphonic poem whose six movements explore personal loss, capitalism, memory, and the passage of time, often through urgent metaphor and paradox: 'I am a poor runner. / But today I am running to the next mailbox. / And when I get there, / the next. The path is many paths. / I break the future. I fuse the past. Out of a world of dissonance, this poet creates what we once called spirit: Music is no pair of wings. / It is the bird in mourning. / The consoling conscription of not, not yet …' Recalling the compassionate music of Gustav Mahler, Bruce Bond attempts to teach the heavens what it is to grieve." — Mark Irwin, Poet and Professor at the University of Southern California.
