Alive New and selected poems
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.""--
- Subjects
- Genres
- poetry
Poetry - Published
-
New York :
NYRB/Poets, New York Review Books
[2015]
- Language
- English
- Main Author
- 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 Library Journal Review