Next Day
New and Selected Poems
-
- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision
Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness—shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion—its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy—her first and truest subject.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zarin's fine-tuned seventh collection (after Orbit) visits and revisits familiar themes of love and loss, regret and acceptance, childhood and motherhood. The poems are laced with references to Greek mythology, sketches of Italian life, the natural world (in particular, the seashore), and nursery rhymes. The collection includes sonnets, sequences, and several multipart poems. Little escapes Zarin's eye; in "Looking for the Great Horned Owl in Truro Woods," the speaker asks, "And then, what was more mysterious/ than us, crashing through the woods// to see a sound?" Baby cormorants in a painting are described as "small, feckless/ thunderclouds painted by a dabbler who/ wants to get everything in." Zarin seems to search for self-knowledge when she urges, "Let my demons rage so I know who they are" ("The Muse of History"). "Ruby at Auction" closes with an image of "The largest ruby/ ever auctioned, outlasting love or sentiment." Perhaps the key to Zarin's work can be found in one of the collection's newest poems, "Farewell": "I filled the house/ with light, because it could not find/ me as the darkness could." This skillful volume finds both light and darkness in abundance.
