Dive into Poetry with Hand-picked books from The Grolier
The Scent of Water
By Ivy Dempsey
"The Scent of Water maps a pilgrimage from a child's puzzled awakening, through the shock of adult despairs, toward the humbling wisdom of acceptance. How does meaning happen in our immediate experience? And what role must a basic sense of reverence play as we parse our world? Throughout the poems, these questions underlie the vital impact of specific landscapes of trees, skies, and waters in Oklahoma, Kansas, California, and New Mexico. In trees, especially, Dempsey finds a symbol for our belonging both to the heart of earth and body of the heavens in a mysterious universe that welcomes biblical as well as scientific interpretations. Bringing the reader to both root and light, The Scent of Water proposes that the way we live and die can be transformed when we understand that one energy sustains all our minds, bodies, each burning star."
"Liquid Fire runs through these poems so that, drawn by the energy, we "fall upward" into the brilliant gaze of this woman - poet and seeker- who has compressed a lifetime-balanced precipitously between "a cleansed and shining world" and "the terror"-into a redemptive action, an enchantment resonating with song. Each person who reads, and reads again, these poems will be grateful for their honesty and the notes that "fall-weighted, essential," into the mind and heart."
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Ocean Effects
"Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin's National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin's trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth-century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin's monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place."
-Louisiana State university Press
"Over the past four decades, in an era deeply suspicious of the relationship between language and external reality, Brendan Galvin has been quietly reminding us that the best poetry can deepen our understanding of the natural world and each other."
-National Book Award Statement
"Galvin would like us to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel the world that is always there, moment by simple moment, a world replete with epiphanies of the commonplace, various kinds of clarifications and gifts, gifts that too often go unnoticed....Galvin is at the top of his form, still going strong."
-Peter Makuck, Laurel Review
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Willow Water
by Erika Mumford
"To the work of the imagination-how to move through adversity, how to make of it something to outlast the event- Erika Mumford brings a well-tuned ear, a storytelling gift, a generosity and a atragic sense that does not preclude hilarity. For sheer daft brilliance, her account of a mad navigator's last days aboard the Teignmouth Electron is unlike anything I can think of, and should not be missed."
"In this collection ardent passion is controlled by virtuoso technique; the reader is confronted with an honesty tempered by compassionate sanity. The poems are concerned with matters of life, death, and the connections - human and spiritual - that guide us through our dark woods. One comes away refreshed by "willow water" and ready to continue the stumbling journey."
"Musical, confident, a whiz at the keyboard of the long, narrative poem, and at probing themes of family, landscape and history, Erika Mumford's work beckons us to share those worlds she so expertly and generously describes. This collection deserves a wide and appreciative audience.
The Same Water
"Murray's poems are hard, direct, and reliable. They have no excess whatever. I like them a good deal, both for their language and especially for their commitment to intelligence and a clear moral vision"
"I am amazed by the world that Joan Murray was able to bring to life....I am haunted by her passionate and honest voice, by her relentless courage, by the terrible and beautiful moments.
"An exceptionally generous and moving book."
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The Dark Indigo Current
"With an eye for the telling image and tongue for the flavor of truth, Thomas R. Smith. In The Dark Indigo Current. unfolds the long pilgrimage of a father's death. In these poems, we feel the harness-eight of both the living and the dead. In these poems, we feel the harness-weight of both the lving and the dead against the author's flesh, as moment of longing, of memory, of simple and clear connection, stand impeccably revealed amid the barns, ice-fishing shacks, and cars in which they take place. The reader of this collection is left a little more awakened, deepened in relationship to this faithfully renewing earth in which people and objects vanish, and do not return again."
"At some point in my private war for beauty, words end up as unwilling draftees in a shivering army of verbs and nouns whom I prod and bully into a ragged troop of paragraphs sent to their deaths in a book. Why is it then, for Thomas Smith, that some of these same words volunteer, standing patiently in long lines to get into his poems, where they naturally flock, wheeling up through clouds of grief and possibility like migrating cranes, their cries lingering in the breeze long after they've been read? All my admiration for The Dark Indigo Currant."
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Furnace Harbor
"In Furnace Harbor, Philip Church recreates a derelict, ghost-town iron-works in the back country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to explore generation, identity, history - those human lonelinesses lived within the process of Earth."
-University of Illinois Press
"Furnace Harbor is a book length dance-to-finish poem whose song dazzles and swoops and croons with the life of our northern American Lake Country. Thick with Myth, history, bawdy and bold vignettes, often tender, always intense, it's rhapsody of heartbeats. Nothing could be more welcome to contemporary poetry than an astonishing first work such asFurnace Harbor."
"An intricate fabric of song - erotic, celebratory, vast, holy, heart-breaking - where the cyclical and heroic identities of land and man intertwine, where the song is the story."
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Cries of Swimmers
Maura Stanton was born in Evanston, Illinois, and is a graduate of the university of Minnesota and the university of Iowa. Her first volume of poetry,Snow on Snow, was published by Yale University Press. Her Novel, Molly Companion, was published by Bobbs-Merrill. Ms. Stanton's poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Crazy Horse, Esquire, The New Yorker, Poetry, and other magazines. She has received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Foundation Prize.
Maura Stanton has been Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Mary Washington College and has taught Fiction writing and poetry writing in New York State, Virginia, California, Arizona and Indiana. She currently teaches at Indiana University.
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How Rain Records Its Alphabet
"Reverence pervades this engagement "in visual alphabet," replete with the Tao of high desert, discovered, restated ("Primrose can take the whole/ bed's desert over," "Desert can overtake the whole/ bed's primrose"; "To overtake the whole primrose bed/ the desert flees/ a dense scrutiny"). The liberal, beautiful facts for the senses to touch and equate to form splayed punctuation of human intention ("Woke with a car alarm scraping my ears"). Residence means breathing among, thus in context, and sometimes with eyes (closed). John Tritica is fluent in miracles often unnoticed. He watches the smells as the colors are sung (sing themselves). And forms nourishment that punctuates a life. Part of residing is worshiping blends of of the holy and common ("How rain records its alphabet"), aware that they switch roles and places ("birds comma the slight wind"; "mushrooms kiss the rotted trees"). This work finds nourishment by juxtaposing human habit and its sister industry of bees, branches, rain evolving a spirit toward "Stillness, and intense act."
"Recalling at times the densely textured orchestrations of Hart Crane, Robert Duncan, or Clark Coolidge, Tritica's poetry ultimately stakes out its own territory, adding something of high value to the twentieth-century tradition of experimental lyricism.
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Coast to Coast
"This first full-length collection by one of America's leading literary critics contains 35 elegant, meditative lyrics. With challenging emotional honesty, making use of geographic tensions between our two coasts, Bruce Bawer peculates on the terms and significance of religious devotion, the life of art, family, and homosexual love."
"Unafraid of sentiment, unabashed in his use of formal prosody, and unadorned in his expression of religious faith, Bruce Bawer Explores a world of longing and attachment....In the arresting final section he writes of the experience of recognizing the love he was convinced would be denied to him. It is the examination of his stunned joy in "sixty-fifth Street Poems" That crowns the book."
"What I like most about Bruce Bawer's poetry, beside its being so gracefully written, is its truthfulness. The love poems are especially convincing."
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Lake Michigan and Other Poems
"There is a gentle kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, and understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda. Whatever his subject matter, whether it is a man adrift in a life raft or an epic vision of lake Michigan, Smith's Poems are journeys worth taking."
"The Magnum Opus of Jared Smith's new collection is "Lake Michigan," truly a major poem. Because of its reach and depth, he will inevitably be compared to Sandburg and Whitman, as his lake becomes the "sea of experience" encompassing Chicago and the other cities of its shores. He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts that our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Aesthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. These are bold poems of tempered experience, often as remarkable for their graceful sensitivity as their scope.
"Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality. Years ago, on my author-interview show on NPR, I hailed Jared as "the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman." The comparison is strengthened with Lake Michigan And Other Poems. Here is Whitman reincarnate making poetry out of our most casual, colloquial, idiomatic talk. But we must admit one significant difference. At his best, Jared Smith speaks with an intensity that Walt rarely reached and that only Seamus Heaney can match."
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