Collected Poems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“Careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found.” —Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review
A monumental celebration of “one of the most significant poets writing today” (David Baker, Los Angeles Review of Books).
In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review).
From “Apple Tree”
O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three,
this one, this one life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These poems, collected from eight books dating back to 1976, establish Voigt as one of the most proficient and accomplished poets writing today. Infusing narrative with lyric power, these precise, yet visceral entries engage with ordinary people in their strangeness, as well as with animals domesticated and wild. As a Virginia farmer's daughter reckons with the implicit racism of her childhood, she posits the unpleasantness as an "instructive poison" that can inoculate one against subscribing to such notions. No stranger to the brutalities of farming, she pictures the chaos of cows being prepared for slaughter: "one beast/ mounts another in a panic that looks erotic." Disrupted marriages proliferate; a betrayed wife's heart is a "hinged clam" with "an appetite for garbage." "Kyrie," a prescient sonnet sequence about the 1918–1919 flu epidemic, is sandwiched between more personal narratives, but each poem achieves, through earned emotion and vision, broader impact. A trained pianist since childhood, Voigt is a musician at heart and a formalist who rarely works in received forms. This rewarding and expansive work does justice to her commendable vision and ear.
