The White Eyelash
Poems
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A poetry collection of “peculiar grace” from the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist author of Dailies & Rushes (Brian Phillips, Poetry Magazine).
Susan Kinsolving’s first poetry collection, Dailies & Rushes, was hailed as a “brilliant debut” by the New York Times, and “grand and almost terrifying” by the New Yorker. In her new work, The White Eyelash, she turns the extremes of her recent experiences—especially those with her ageing, mentally ill mother—into poems of harsh factuality. This dark narrative sequence is highly contrasted by the humor presented in a section called “Light Fare & Oddballs.” Once again, Kinsolving exhibits a daunting range with signature style and substance.
“[The White Eyelash] finds the poet remembering her trouble mother, concentrating on visual detail or pursuing light-verse forms and verbal games with a demotically highbrow, casual grace. . . . Often organized around colors . . . these poems show a love for beauty and a casual line reminiscent of Eamon Grennan’s.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The follow-up to Kinsolving's widely praised Dailies & Rushes (1999) finds the poet remembering her troubled mother, concentrating on visual detail or pursuing light-verse forms and verbal games with a demotically highbrow, casual grace. The most memorable new poems concern a mother whose mental illness made the poet's teen years hard; with a conversational feel that belies her lines' painful facts, Kinsolving describes her mother's decline into dementia, her last months in hospitals and nursing homes, and the mysteries that remain: near death, the mother "shouts, I hope you get arrested for having everything/ your own way! And now, neither of us knows what to say." These poems have the virtues, and defects, of straightforward memoir, focusing more on events and feelings than on verbal detail. Straightforward autobiographical lyrics also take up a daughter (now adult) and travel (the Isle of Skye). Kinsolving shows more delight, however, in the less personal stand-alone poems with which the volume begins and ends. Her light verse includes run-on couplets, a villanelle, lyrics for a cantata about astronomy and some in-jokes (including a purported e-mail from Emily Dickinson); these last shade into Kinsolving's more serious, elegiac verse, focused on lost creatures and lost things, from endangered species to forgotten poems. Often organized around colors ("gray graphite," blood, deep snow) these poems show a love for beauty and a casual line reminiscent of Eamon Grennan's. Kinsolving takes care to reflect "other worlds, other lives, what is not/ true, kaleidoscope turning, changing points of view." Correction: In the Oct. 6 PW, the title of Louise Erdrich's new poetry collection was misstated; it is Original Fire.
