Alive New and selected poems

Elizabeth Willis

Book - 2015

"Called by Susan Howe "one of the most outstanding poets of her generation," the American poet Elizabeth Willis has written some of the most luminous, electrifyingly lyrical poems of the past twenty years. This collection includes work from her five books, poems previously published only in magazines, and a section of new poems. With a poetics as attentive to the music of thought as George Oppen's and an ear that evokes the wildness of Rimbaud's Illuminations, Willis charts intricate, subterranean affinities. Her poems draw us into a range of pleasures and concerns--from the scientific pastorals of Erasmus Darwin, to the domain of painters, politicians, erstwhile saints, witches, and agitators. Within the intimate a...nd civic address of these poems, we witness the chaos of the contemporary world as it falls, for an ecstatic moment, into place: "The word comes at me with its headlights on, so it's revelation and not death.""--

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811.54/Willis
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2nd Floor 811.54/Willis Due Dec 7, 2024
Subjects
Genres
poetry
Poetry
Published
New York : NYRB/Poets, New York Review Books [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Elizabeth Willis (-)
Online Access
Cover image
Physical Description
192 pages ; 18 cm
ISBN
9781590178645
  • From: Second law (1993)
  • from: The human abstract (1995) (A maiden
  • from: Songs for A
  • The human extract)
  • from: Turneresque (2003) (Autographeme
  • Sonnet
  • The tree of personal effort
  • Van Tromp, going about to please his masters, ships a sea, getting a good wetting
  • The young Blake
  • Arthur in Egypt
  • The wolfman
  • A woman's face
  • On dangerous ground
  • Kiss me deadly
  • September 9
  • Elegy
  • Book of Matthew
  • from: Drive).
  • From: Meteoric flowers (2006) (The similitude of this great flower
  • Sympathetic inks
  • Her mossy couch
  • A description of the poison tree
  • Grateful for asparagus
  • The oldest part of the Earth
  • Verses omitted
  • On the resemblance of some flowers to insects
  • The principal catastrophe
  • Of which I shall have occasion to speak again
  • Pictures connected by a slight festoon of ribbons
  • Viewless floods of heat
  • The ghost of Hamlet
  • Departure of the nymphs like northern nations skating on the ice
  • Verses omitted by mistake
  • Bright o'er the floor
  • Solar volcanos
  • Loud cracks from ice mountains explained
  • Ancient subterranean fires
  • Plundering honey
  • Accidental breezes
  • Primeval islands
  • Ferns, mosses, flags).
  • From: The paintings of Giorgione (2006)
  • from: Address (2011) (Address
  • Nocturne
  • Friday
  • A species is an idea (1)
  • Flow chart
  • The witch
  • Vernacular architecture
  • Ruskin
  • A species is an idea (2)
  • January
  • Extended forecast
  • Triptik
  • Classified
  • In strength sweetness).
  • New and uncollected poems (The completist
  • Survey
  • Bulfinch
  • Alabama
  • Watertown is ninety-nine percent land
  • Oil and water
  • Self-portrait with imaginary brother
  • Defoe
  • Steady digression to a fixed point
  • Suez (1938)
  • Coup
  • Sonnet 63 1/2
  • Alive).
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Willis (Address) has been enthralling, challenging, and frustrating the poetry cognoscenti with hermetic, allusive, scholarly, and startlingly opaque verse and prose since the early 1990s: "When I point to the island I mean a body on a map. Think about the heart: it doesn't have to form a sentence." Her prose blocks, strings of sentences, and short, dense lines tend to reach toward the mind before the heart, and this selected volume, her first, might engage more (and baffle fewer) readers if it is read backward, the newest poems first. The evocative declarations within her prose poems-especially in 2006's Meteoric Flowers-belie the evasions their imagined voices imply: "What sudden rhetoric trembles at the door? I see clouds reflected in the gutter, but they're still clouds." And her earlier investigations of lyric form and elusive meaning require deep thought and deliberation: "Human understanding is a savage construction// of dilation and resistance... We live in a sunspot// 'little o.'" Willis also stands out for the many various ways she uses sources from the visual arts, incorporating Ruskin, Giorgione, J.M.W. Turner, Joseph Cornell, and William Blake. Willis's challenging, cerebral work rewards the patient reader, and this selection should help her reach a wider audience. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The recipient of multiple honors (e.g., the National Poetry Series, a Guggenheim), Willis offers the penetrating musings and sometimes fragmented syntax of a contemporary Emily Dickinson but can feel like a spirited surrealist ("Though my heart were a pear tree/ threaded with fire/ Lion you leapt through me/ like fineness in the boundary gene"). Starting stringently and getting richer with cultural and political references as it proceeds, this Selected offers gems from five collections and culminates in a dozen new or uncollected pieces. Grab it. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.