O'Nights
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
"In Cecily Parks' beautiful poems, the natural world teeters between being and seeming—the seeming a simulacrum projected onto the world by a mind's yearning, taxonomy and dread. Deeply metaphysical, and deeply attentive to our spiritual as well as physical uses and abuses of nature, O'Nights implicates language's —indeed, lyric poetry's—sad role in this endeavor."—Susan Wheeler
In O'Nights, Cecily Parks constructs stunning manifestations of a modern Thoreauvian wilderness, investigating how the natural world gives shape to the self, body, and emotions. These lyrical, transcendental poems study the duality of nature's feminine and masculine identities, and in its simplicity, offers a space where humankind truly belongs.
From "Bell":
This progress, as in the wind-scalloped snowmeadow
pretending to be moon. This love that sets us scrambling
over the map's last ridge, our red hoods bright
in shrunken sky. This metallic weather in which we
are the ore. This alder. These crimson-tipped willows
reverberating next to a river of turquoise ice. This
following the deep tracks of one coyote stepping
where another has stepped. This wilderness
that we trespass, burning like berries in the juniper
and becoming the air in the belfry.
Cecily Parks is the author of the chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) and the collection Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vigorous second outing from Parks (Field Folly Snow) lends itself to a very specific summary: it is an erotic and romantic lyric (written by a woman, about a modern woman's life in the city) that blends, collides, and reacts with the northern woodsmanship of an updated Thoreau. The author of Walden provides the title and epigraph, both of which are taken from his journals, and his intrepid spirit guides Parks's explorations of "the voice of fox paws/ in leaves" and "the woodpile's reverie." The many ways to pace and arrange free verse let Parks wander, axe in hand, through her redolent New England terrain (she also includes a couple of prose poems). At the same time and in the same lines she presents an urbane figure at ease in her body. "Out of all the places/ I've worn this sleeveless dress/ only the woods has been the place// for lust." A few poems addressed to "the doctor" make clear Parks's debts to William Carlos Williams, though her American language does not sound like his; instead, she presents a carnival of up-to-date pleasures, erotic and otherwise, where "waking is to happiness as the trashcan is to raccoons and then some." Picky readers may fault Parks for the lack of variation beyond free verse; most, however, should find in her walk-up apartments and snow-laden pines a source of serious delight.
