After the Body
New & Selected Poems
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then—in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality—is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For Mathis, the natural world no longer provides the affirmation and solace it once did; the navigation of a darkened hallway at night is a perilous expedition. After the Body charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece. Through close and relentless observation of her own physical being, Mathis shows us how miniscule ambition, planning, and a sense of control over our own bodies are—things we so blithely take as real and solid when healthy. Her many publications, awards, and praise from peers testify that she is a lyric poet of the highest order. This expansive new book reflects a brilliant career, and is a necessary addition to any collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Over the last four decades, Mathis (Book of Dog) has quietly crafted lyrically precise, often harrowing poems in which the poet's "throat is a long avenue of ice,/ cutting the familiar good words/ at their source." This generous volume draws from the poet's recorded gifts and losses: poems of early and late motherhood, a child's mental illness and institutionalization, human and nonhuman deaths within and beyond the poet's purview. As the poet studies "the art of now and wait, to love/ what's not a part of me," the swamps and bayous of her childhood home morph into the woods and coastlines of New England: "Some pinion/ connects who we are with whatever pulls us/ to walk into the evening's wetland grasses/ in an air made of sounds we listen for/ ...the grace of seeing that will save us." To these earlier works are added two dozen new poems of extraordinary acuity, many of them attempts to describe the wracking pain as the poet struggles with crippling illness. Rereading the poet's past work through her present reveals hidden continuities. In these knowing poems, readers may recognize their own humanity, as well as the sometimes-impossible conditions of living.
