Springing
New and Selected Poems
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of The Bird Catcher, this life-spanning volume offers the delight of both discovery and re-discovery, as Ponsot tends the unruly garden of her mind with her customary care and passion. The book opens with a group of new poems, including “What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?”—a question that has kept Ponsot’s work vital for more than five decades. Throughout the selections from her four earlier books and a trove of previously unpublished work covering the years 1946 to 1971, she offers us a “lost haven in a springing world.” Sometimes sharp in her self-perception, but always listing toward pleasure and elegance, unafraid of grief and the passage of time, Ponsot continually refreshes her language and the spirited self from which it emerges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"If leaf-trash chokes the stream bed,/ reach for rock-bottom as you rake/ the muck out," writes Ponsot in one of the 26 new poems of this collection, and the lines might well serve as its wry motto. Springing takes readers on a tour of a quirky, start-stop career, presenting, along with the new work, nine poems from True Minds (1956), 22 from Admit Impediment (1981), 26 from The Green Dark (1988), 19 from The Bird Catcher (which won the 1998 NBCC Award) and 26 other previously uncollected poems from 1948 to 1971. The 25-year pause in book publication would seem to reflect a period of domestic life, documented in the uncollected work ("watching you strike worldly poses flirting/ excited with someone's arch French wife") and ending in "For a Divorce," which opens the Admit Impediment section: "Asked why/ we ever married, I smile/ and mention the arbitrary fierce/ glance of the working artist/ that blazed sometimes in your face// but can't picture it." Ponsot's poems are built around just such unflinching observations of intimate interactions and misfires, whether of familial relations ventriloquized through updated Greek dramatis personae, a French woman's accommodation of her mother's married lover or the self's castings about the natural world, "space recast as/ flatness, long/ diminishings of blue/ borne lightly." If the new and uncollected work doesn't have the focus of the trio of books beginning in the '80s, this selection evinces the larger-scale, muckraking pursuit of artifice's underside that Ponsot's speaker so wonderfully produces poem by poem, "smaller and more human than belief." As she writes in "Gliding": "I envision the next leap, the next/ thousand years of practice,/ the eventual skill/ become like independent flight, habitual." Readers will look forward to those practice sessions.
