Dailies & Rushes
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A National Book Critic's Circle Award-finalist: the "late but brilliant debut" volume that rocketed the acclaimed poet to prominence (The New York Times).
In her first full-length volume of poems, Susan Kinsolving demonstrates an elegant mastery of craft that can only be achieved through decades of refinement. Dailies and Rushes is both a debut collection and a major work by an accomplished poet. Indeed, as Carol Muske points out in her review of this book for The New York Times, "each poem here seems an accomplishment, in the sense of a realized expression as well as structural finality."
With disarming insight, brutal irony, and playful half-buried puns that hit both the eye and the ear, "Kinsolving's poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day's figures and memory's pattern. But she's headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself—and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there" (J. D. McClatchy).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving's debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot. In a familiar, no longer New York School blend of the quotidian and the quixotic, she takes on international politics, the violent death of a relative and the classic urgency of losing and finding love; and yet it is the occasional searing private moment, and not the thematic scope, that makes many of these poems shine. The best, like "The Jellyfish" or "The Night Nurse," strike to the heart of an ironic or Plath-like conundrum: "`These are your numbers,' she soothes. `You must/ not refuse. The hospital provides them free/ of charge and we can insert them without leaving/ scars.'" Often it is the half-buried pun that satisfies here rather than her more overt word-play, and similarly, the poems frequently end with a ponderous last line that sometimes works, and sometimes comes off belabored: "I hear/ the closing door as it has never closed before." Kinsolving's tone can indeed be lofty, speaking of death as "the great weight of being," and the frequent repetitions are often ineffective, coming off more as unwieldly struggles than as artifice. But in her impressively stylized constructions and "more than meets the eye" depths (well explored in Richard Howard's rapt introduction) there remains a mutable, complex imagery ("The sick float past their bloodsteams into an evening of smooth lakes") giving even the more uneven pieces an ambivalent appeal.
