After Image
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Image travels between life and death, between a living body and its absence.
A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
George (Asterisk) examines in her stunning third collection the space left by the death of a loved one—not an emptiness, but a collection of artifacts and memories, a world that suddenly takes on new meaning. The collection's title suggests the overlaying of a new existence over the speaker's old one, but recently enough that a past image remains visible as an outline. Fragments of the deceased still pulse with life in a photograph, and the memory of a snowstorm is described as "The air a world/ of cold white bees." In other arresting moments, George describes a striking tableau of the body of the deceased: "Hands folded like a bride. Dark cave/ of the mouth, open." Life's ongoing nature is at times a comfort, at times unimaginable to the speaker: "The earth goes on without me./ It's humiliating./ Peony shoots pushing their purple faces/ out of the ground." In the brilliantly disconcerting "Autobiography of a Vulture," death sustains life: "I hatched from the void./ Crawled into the glow/ on my pinhooks, craving meat./ The first scrap unlocked my throat./ All of us in the nest/ open and swaying for it—/ little death flowers." This is a monumental work on death and grieving in a deceptively slim package.
