Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing: “Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life’s subtle, steady shiftings (‘the bird’s hunger, seeking shape’). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent (‘I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun’), the next poem turns immediately to progress (and hence progression) as a modern invention beyond the heaven-and-hell alternatives; finally, the poet concedes, ‘I lose track of my transitions.’ In fact, transition defines us. Here, a static painting gives way to ‘between and among,’ a simple typeface never yields a perfect copy, and even in a medieval score, two exquisite quavers are connected by a slur. Highly recommended.”
"Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity."—The Washington Post
"Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things—but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."—Poetry
In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro.
From "Before and Every After":
Eventually one dreams the real thing.
The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle
a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat
made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky
passing into rock and underground river.
A single row of strangers faced front, each of us
behind another close
as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up
politely, pre-flight…
Marianne Boruch is the author of ten collections of poetry. She is the 2013 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her meditative new collection, Boruch (Cadaver, Speak) writes at once with and against the cascade of information and fevered, restless attention that mark contemporary daily life. These poems move with an ease and dexterity among current events, etymology, the environment, architecture, memories, and family histories. Boruch's patient, quiet consideration of each of her many interests anchors the collection, and the persistence of the thinking, observing mind is the counterpoint and antidote to "all that cheering and static across mountains and cities/ and wires and rivers unto ocean and airspace and star-studded orbits." The excess by which she's "pelted every day/ by factoids. Word unto word unto word" does not dull the act of creation: "Wow. To make anything at all, be it/ moonlight or a shrug." With the flaneur's relaxed wisdom, Boruch places the exceptional within the mundane and the intimate within the universal, and above all highlights the present moment without ever losing sight of a broader context in which now is just one moment among many: "Because it's ancient: there is/ no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that." Readers are invited to think carefully through the world they've inherited, with Boruch's discerning eye and conversational voice as a guide.