Synopses & Reviews
Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the reader into a mesmerizing world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the questions that undergird all of art, all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the image of the sparrow, flitting from Catullus to the contemporary lyric.
Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of poetry and acting, the marriage of two artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be, in this profound elegiac collection, one of today’s finest living poets.
Review
"Marriage is a pact with an other both beloved and unknowable and loss, therefore, means losing both what we know and what we can never circumscribe. Sparrow is a stunning elegy for the actor David Dukes, but like all great poetry, it reaches beyond the specifics of a life, or a death. In poems haunted by Lear and Godot, Catullus and Oscar Wilde, a chorus of shades, art's animating phantoms, ghost this brooding, loving book into startling life." Mark Doty
Review
"A private matter Sparrow may invoke, but it reaches to the center of so much loss personal and public." Adrienne Rich
Review
"Sparrow is an act of retrieval, a way of reviving David Dukes through memory. The lines of the poems are, in effect, life-lines, and within them he is brought back into a second life, one that will last." Mark Strand
Review
"Sparrow is a powerful, compelling journey from the loss of a personal paradise to the regaining that follows. Carol Muske-Dukes shows us how grief can be stabilized by craft and sense brought to bear on anguish, one careful line of poetry at a time." Billy Collins
Review
"[Carol Muske-Dukes is] that wonderful rare thing: a poet who has the ability to deepen the secrets of experience even while revealing them." Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
"These poems...are at once extravagantly emotional in content and tightly controlled as verse, two qualities that echo the extremeness of the committed romance described throughout Sparrow." The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Two years ago, Carol Muske-Duke's husband tragically and unexpectedly passed away. Sparrow is a journey through the landscape of her grief. The marriage of two artists is always filled with complexity, and Muske-Dukes brilliantly enacts these contradictions in the poems. She strips away the layers of invention that make up a man, a marriage, love, and grief. "What is the difference between love and grief?" she asks in a poem, and finds no answer but the fragility of life itself, embodied in the presence of the small sparrow that appears in several of the poems. With this profound, elegiac collection, Carol Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be one of today's finest living poets.
About the Author
Carol Muske-Dukes is the founder and director of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her last collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and she has been the recipient of many awards, among them a Guggenheim fellowship. She has written three novels, and Married to the Icepick Killer, a collection of essays on Hollywood and poetry published in 2002, is her most recent book. She writes a regular column for the Los Angeles Times Book Review called “Poets’ Corner” and reviews for The New York Times. Muske-Dukes lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.