Prodigal de Linda Gregerson

Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2014

Linda Gregerson

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 aug 2015

In her first book of collected work, prize-winning poet Linda Gregerson mines nearly forty years of poetry, bringing us a full range of her talents.

Ten new poems introduceProdigal,followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadly in subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson’s standing as “one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality” (Chicago Tribune).

A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet's intellect in the midst of her career.

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Recenzii

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice

“The next time someone asks me what advantage poetry holds over prose, I will point to these lines, which move beyond the description of pain to its tangible embodiment…Gregerson attains what few contemporary poets even seek: a plausible 'we,' a basis for speaking across the lines of individual circumstance and social identity.”—Dan Chiasson,The New Yorker

"Dizzyingly ambitious and fiercely beautiful...The pleasures of such a retrospective are the pleasures of long acquaintance, and with Gregerson, those pleasures are both sensual and intellectual. The poems’ gorgeousness of sound and image is checked by a ferocious, sometimes acerbic, always morally demanding intelligence, at once plangent and analytic."—The Atlantic Online

"Prodigalis the testament of an American stoic, with one foot in the Dust Bowl of her ancestors and the other firmly planted in modern theories of biological determinism...Amazing,Prodigalshows us, to think what we've amounted to, considering where we're from.”—Srikanth Reddy,New York Times Book Review

"Prodigalby Linda Gregerson, tenderly considers a wide range of topics: personal, political, literary. The speaker’s clear vision and vast understanding are balanced by deep empathy. The 10 new poems draw from Roman mythology, pairing ancient wisdom with modern situations and concerns. That duality grounds the writing and provides wry insights into the desires of mortals, as in the second poem, 'The Wrath of Juno,' in which the goddess reflects on women’s longing for children and offhandedly mentions in vitro fertilization. The selected poems, from five earlier collections, create their own mythologies as Gregerson develops a style as distinctive for its jagged line lengths as for its compelling logic. Many poems feature deeply moving narratives about family traumas, loss and illness, the frailties of the body, and the longing for a divine presence. Some of the most affecting work focuses on children who’ve been abused by loved ones or who abuse themselves. In the title poem, the speaker describes a teenager whose skin 'was almost otherworldly, touch/ so silken it seemed another kind/ of sight.' Yet 'she takes/ her scissors to that perfect page.'"—Washington Post

"Gregerson’s syntax will make your heart stop. These are radiant poems about all manner of chance and misfortune. Gregerson makes us realize all the suffering adjacent to us in daily life."—The New Yorker, "Twelve Books of Poems, About Poems, or Tangentially Related to Poems from 2015"

“A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.”—Publishers Weekly

"The breadth of poetic creativity in National Book Award finalist Gregerson’s grand compilation is beautiful in scope, elastic in space, and spectacularly aware and erudite. As she considers Roman gods, the limits of Earth, art, and politics, her use of delicate detail and experimental forms create a vibrant tapestry, while more ethereal subjects and language together coalesce into an introspective pattern of discovery. Ten brilliantly etched new poems followed by a hand-picked collection of 50 poems from her previous five collections, spanning fromFirein the Conservatory(1982) toThe Selvage(2012), make this one of the most important poetry volumes of the season."—Mark Eleveld,Booklist

Notă biografică

LINDA GREGERSON’s honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Kingsley Tufts Award, and the selection ofMagnetic Northas a National Book Award finalist. Gregerson is a professor at the University of Michigan. Her poetry appears in theAtlantic,The New Yorker, Poetry, theYale Review, and many other publications.

Extras

Sostenuto

Night. Or what

they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
air, what was

in my lungs just an hour ago is now
in yours,
there’s only so much air to go

around.They’re making
more people,my father would say,

but nobody’s making more land.
When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,

they invented a game whose logic
largely escaped me —
something to do with the

disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks — until
I asked them what they called it. They

were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
Keeping the ducks alive, I think,

was what you were supposed to
contrive, as long
as you could make it last. Up here

in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
cubic feet of steerage we’re
a long

held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
than human breath could manage. In

the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
the goddess turned away from them.

from De Arte Honeste Amandi
How Love, When It Has Been Acquired, May Be Kept

That was when the war was on, the one we felt good
to hate, so of course I thought he’d come from there.
It was June. The light grown long again.
She’d roll his chair to the window

and back. But no, you said, it was love.
They were getting it wrong.
A leg. A leg. An arm to the elbow.
Like the man who burned his daughter to get

good winds. The sea for days had been flat
as the sky. He’d walk while the light went down
and could only tell the water from the air by the drag
below his knees. So this is what it’s like

to have no body. A perfect benevolent temperature.
The wheels of the chariots grind
in the hulls of the ships. He lay so still he honeycombed,
may he be safe, may we be sound. The time

they bargained for came piece by piece.

Indications That One’s Love Has Returned

There’s an illness, of the sort that’s named for a man
who first imagines that disparate threads might be threads
on a loom, that is called his syndrome, and frightens
the weaver, who cannot unravel by night

what she sees in the day. Their table had the sun for hours.
The piazza was white. They talked
about physicians at home, whose stories were longer, if less
in accord. And about the morning months ago

when the color first spread beneath her eyes.
From cheekbone to cheekbone, the smallest vessels had burst
in a pattern calledbutterfly,they’d named that too,
as the tour guides name rocks till you can’t see the
sandstone plain

anymore, but Witch’s Cauldron and Hornet’s Nest.
The wings went away. The course of the river that carved
the rock
is air now, and baffles intent. She’d been used to a different notion
of course, the kind you might follow for love of the thing

or of knowledge, the wings in the glass.

Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2014

Preț: 110^.18 lei

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Papetărie, jocuri, reviste

Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2014

Preț: 110.18 lei

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Preț: 110^.18 lei