Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
New work from an awardwinning poet
Joanna Klink has won acclaim for poetry of bracing emotional intensity. Of her most recent book, Raptus, Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Klink s fourth collection is a passionate but controlled lyric meditation on time, intimacy, memory, and the increasingly imperiled natural world. Reminiscent of (and drawing on) Eliot s Four Quartets and Rilke s Duino Elegies, the poems here announce, "I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life/ and it failed me." Klink (Raptus) moves through a litany of personal, human, and civilization-level errors toward a future both unknown and unsure. "I knew every occasion the music rising off the piano,/ held in the air in plumes of distraction, sometimes rich, sometimes scaled to terror," she writes, acknowledging that "No one knew what was coming." Klink can be grandiose in her use of pronouns, but her poems of longing never lack beauty ("your hand catching the bone of my hip/ filled our aloneness"). Yet, the real stars of the book, and those most moving in their intensity, are her elegies for the nature that sustains us: "Even the greenest city may become a reef./ Take nothing more from each other." American poetry sorely needs poets willing to address such large topics in a mode like this. "If there is a world," Klink writes, "let me be in it."
