Flight: New and Selected Poems
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- 4,49 €
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- 4,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From this critically acclaimed and award-winning poet, a stunning volume of new and selected works that display her signature intelligence, depth, and vigorous originality.
Hailed as ?visionary? by The New Yorker and ?radiant? by The New York Times Book Review, Linda Bierds returns with a collection that gives us the best of her astonishing work, and then gives us more: the gift of fifteen new poems. As a poet, she has always shied away from the easy indulgences of confessional poetry, turning her attention instead to the things that unite us in our common humanity? art, science, music, history?and bringing alive people (some famous, some little-known) who have made contributions to these spheres. The new poems are no less vital, transporting the reader from medieval to modern-day Venice to the moon; from anatomical sketches to primitive mapping and early naturalism? returning always to the empathy that guides her work.
These tightly woven poems are linked organically through repeating imagery, reflected and refracted through the prism of Bierds?s singularly rich imagination. Her language itself communicates just as much as this visuality; as Stanley Plumly has said, ?The autobiography of her imagination would only be half as intense were the writing itself less beautiful and clear, less perfect to pitch.?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The eighth volume and first retrospective from MacArthur winner Bierds (First Hand) makes her powers clear while showing how little her work has changed since the 1980s. She uses the English language as a composer of symphonic music might use an orchestra, taking romantic sighs, noble passages and high-flown trills from a full range of vocabulary and reference. She applies her lyrical, humane sensibility and her way with descriptive language to her own life occasionally, but far more often to the lives of eminent artists, writers, inventors and scientists Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Anton van Leeuwenhoek (who invented the microscope), Marc Chagall, Dr. Tulp (of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson), Dorothy Wordsworth, the British physicist and public lecturer Michael Faraday. Ever alert to loss, Bierds finds the human and natural worlds worthy of fragile praise. In her marriage of research with appreciation, Bierds can recall Amy Clampitt, though she may lack Clampitt's range. In one of several new poems set in Venice, Bierds watches "the sea quickly cast/ its daily mass, herringbone brick by brick." An older poem sees farmers in an English village grind cow horns into translucent house windows, whose "moth-wing haze... softened our guests with the gauze light/ of the Scriptures."
