Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories–first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs–but who no longer belong to anyone.Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GtPW3STVX0&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=10&feature=plcp
Though most of Jane Tyson Clement’s poems remained hidden in private notebooks during her lifetime, the few that traveled beyond her hands were widely admired and drew critical acclaim. Now, with this first comprehensive anthology of her work, the public can at last discover this gifted poet and give her the audience she deserves. Evoking comparisons to such better-known contemporaries as Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, and Denise Levertov, Clement is direct and understated. Even when technically sophisticated, her poetry speaks with a familiar voice and draws on accessible images from the natural world. Still, these are no mere “nature poems.” In exploring the varied emotions of life – of love, longing, and loss; memory, sacrifice, and desire; struggle and frustration, joy and resolve – they reveal the tireless seeking of a generous and honest heart and beckon the reader down new avenues of seeing and hearing.
A Crown for Ted and Sylvia is a book of poetry for Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes fans and for those obsessed by their compelling literary story. It examines questions about the politics of family and shifting perspectives over time, and asks why some families are fated to repeat certain narratives over generations. Finally, those who enjoy traditional forms, such as sonnets, villanelles, and pentinas, will find plenty of them here.
Ever since the Middle Ages, the first hour of daily prayer in monastic life–Matins–has roused the community from sleep. Wisely, the second hour was reserved for Lauds, which means praise. Praise with that freshly awakened consciousness. In this way, such an attitude toward the world, seen and unseen, could be absorbed before breakfast.
The poems in this book continue that tradition–though outside a monastic community–of waking up, reflecting, and discerning what there is to praise–and how, and whom. The book constructs an introspective retrospective of a woman charged with curiosity and accommodating doubt. Over decades, she acknowledges with gratitude her own daily shaping by students, grandchildren, rhinos–a public and private history full of saints and ain'ts.
Beyond the author's erstwhile community chanting Lauds, she explores its resonance with wit and wistfulness and arrives at this truth: praise over time alters the one who gives it.
These poems seek to be playful with faith. Their aim is to expose the underlying sacredness of events that form the liturgy of living and to do so with sensitivity toward mystery, wonder, and occasionally suspicion. Some of them seek to tell stories left untold by the narratives of faith; others prod the narratives of ordinary life to see where faith may be hiding. These poems do not understand faith as an intellectual choice but rather as an involuntary trust in something beyond us, something always unclear, ill-lit, and inadequately characterized by the language religious people use to describe ultimate realities. They seek not so much to dismantle that language as to subvert its self-assuredness, to find words that surprise and compel different ways of seeing.