Red Trousseau
Poems
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America’s greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement … Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.
The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in "Red Trousseau," “hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal,” to the sun in "Unsent letter.” in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins” In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red—the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros it self, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft.
"With Red Trousseau, Carol Muske achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation with its humanity: terror, sometimes courage, excessive need, and the stubborn twin habits of hope and representation. This is urgent and beautifully confident work.’—Jorie Graham
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Red--the color of eroticism, heat and danger--fills this provocative collection of poems by Muske ( Applause ). A murdered woman in ``a sunset-colored dress''; red mouths; stigmata; the sacred heart; Masai red beads; Chinese bridal gowns; scarlet flames around martyrs--red gives illumination as the poet focuses her lens on the beauty and horror of contemporary life. Muske's poetic scope ranges from her home city of Los Angeles, ``that famous city, city of fame, all trash and high / cheekbones, making itself up with the dreamy paints / of a First Stage Alert'' to Prague, where ``History, like a bus, stopped and let us off, / in a pool of some light substance'' and the poet sifts through the metaphorical ashes of Czech Jan Palach, who burned himself to death in protest against the 1968 Soviet invasion. Such mixed motivation for the desire for martyrdom serves as the theme again in the title poem, when the speaker ``suspected her mind of collaboration, / apperceptive ecstasy, the flames wrapped / about her like a red trousseau, yes, / the dream of immolation.'' In her weaker poems, Muske's fondness for finely incised indirection collapses into obscurity, and elliptical images evade and weary the reader. But in her best--e.g., the bold ``Frog Pond''--mannerism gives way to pure, taut style.