Synopses & Reviews
Midsummer Cambridge, MA, 2008
and#160;
Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.
A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,
and#160;
A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:
The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattenedandndash;honey not for babes.
and#160;
All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled
Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor
and#160;
Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.
Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.
and#160;
On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made?
What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult,
and#160;
Grass veining the hands. Someoneandrsquo;s baby toddling.
And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer.
A remarkable first book, Disorder tells the story, by turns poignant and outrageous, of a familyandrsquo;s dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes readers on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Uganda, from England to Massachusetts and North Carolina, tracing the path of familial love, obsession, and the passage of time as filtered through the perceptions of family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, amorous vicars, and a dubious polygamist. We experience throughout a speaker forged by a deep awareness of intergenerational, multicontinental consciousness. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries in ways that few books of poetry do, Disorder bristles with quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence.
Review
"[Maggie Dietz]'s got plenty of attitude, as well as skill to back it up....[Her] lippy candor is invigorating in a wish-I'd-thought-of-that way, and it's a pleasure to be led through her world as she looks at familiar subjects with fresh eyes....Intimate, idiomatic and thoroughly original."
Review
“Graced with a subtlety of vision and formal versatility that bring Bishop and Bogan quickly to mind, Maggie Dietzs Perennial Fall both embodies and enacts the trajectory from being haunted by loss, to accepting the fact of it, to refusing a life that doesnt include ‘dusk, dying, [and] ends. ‘I love/this world, my heart is/here, where a body breathes, says Dietz, reluctant to know an afterlife where theres ‘Nothing to tend,/nothing you're up against. Dietz speaks with the hard-won authority of one ‘who's lost, whos lost someone and has learned that to love and suffer is to have lived fully, and with eyes wide open. These poems are the stirring record of such a life, and the welcome announcement of a masterful new voice in American poetry.”
Review
"Graced with a subtlety of vision and formal versatility that bring Bishop and Bogan quickly to mind, Maggie Dietz's Perennial Fall both embodies and enacts the trajectory from being haunted by loss, to accepting the fact of it, to refusing a life that doesn't include `dusk, dying, [and] ends.' `I love/this world, my heart is/here, where a body breathes,' says Dietz, reluctant to know an afterlife where there's `Nothing to tend,/nothing youre up against.' Dietz speaks with the hard-won authority of one `whos lost, who's lost someone' and has learned that to love and suffer is to have lived fully, and with eyes wide open. These poems are the stirring record of such a life, and the welcome announcement of a masterful new voice in American poetry."-Carl Phillips(Carl Philips)
Review
"Dietz's poems evoke the elemental, organic connections layered beneath the surface of experience in nature and in dreams."
Review
“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. The disturbed speaker of the final, audacious dramatic monologue articulates in its most extreme form Maggie Dietzs sense of the uncanny forces under lifes surface. Her achievement—and the source of excitement for her readers—is an urgent fidelity to both that surface and the underlying caves and rivers of the imagination."
Review
“Perennial Fall is a first book of unusual delicacy and precision of feeling, and masterful economy, even starkness of presentation. I admire the poise in these lines, which is a moral and psychological balance, charged with ambiguity, ripe for disturbance. The human beings in Dietzs poems have a participatory relation to the nature that surrounds them, and human nature in her world is brave and permeable: ‘Among the welcome elements not one/thing did not hunger to be changed. These poems are, themselves, welcome elements in a crowded and noisy world.”
Review
"Once you are invited in, it is difficult to walk out unchanged, to ignore the sense that this fall to which Dietz refers is not simply seasonal, but also a commentary on humanity--its loves, its losses, its own perpetual waiting."
Review
andquot;Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s Disorder is a dazzling debut. These elegant and spare reckonings with both personal and family history resonate with lyric urgency as they arise in the wake of Pravinandrsquo;s wistful--at times quietly sober--reflections. The narratives of Disorder overlap and tremble in their telling, just as the limbs of this family tree seem bent almost to the point of breaking, even as they reach for the future. This superb collection is a timely meditation on the vagaries and varietals of mixed cultures, and Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s poetry is an ever-turning, kaleidoscopic lens.andquot;
Review
andquot;A central challenge for American art has been the confluence of immigrant histories. Rising above conventional approaches to that material, urgent and severe, Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s Disorder attains a global and historical perspective uniquely personal yet wide-ranging.andquot;
Review
andquot;Disorder roots itself in the idea of uprootedness. The poemsandrsquo; many subtitled names and dates point to the rearrangement or disorder of interwoven chronologies: the poetand#39;s storyandmdash;her childhood and itinerate adulthoodandmdash;and her familyand#39;s meandering and troubled past. If and#39;survival depends on stories,and#39; the indelible characters Pravin recreates are, all of them, alive. Pravinand#39;s masterful sense of distance and quiet intensity create a sense of suspension, so that the emotions of even the most intimate lyrics brim just beneath the lines. The poems are remarkable in their capacity to be at once intricate and spare. The bookand#39;s adrift, often solitary, central speaker ponders her seemingly inherited displacement, and the book is rich with other bequests: in different poems, that speaker and her great-grandmother are and#39;resignedand#39; and and#39;inured,and#39; respectively, and#39;to the unexpected.and#39; Culminating in the forceful and unforgettable penultimate poem, and#39;Belief Revision,and#39; Disorder is an astonishing debut, unexpected in its maturity, understatement and resonance.andquot;
Synopsis
At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.
Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches “like fish.” By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its “perennial fall”—both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness.
“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. This is a spectacular debut and more than that—a wonderful book.”—Robert Pinsky
Synopsis
At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hingethe point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.
Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches “like fish.” By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its “perennial fall”both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness.
“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. This is a spectacular debut and more than thata wonderful book.”Robert Pinsky
Synopsis
At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.
Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches “like fish.” By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its “perennial fall”—both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness.
“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. This is a spectacular debut and more than that—a wonderful book.”—Robert Pinsky
Synopsis
This remarkable first book of poems tells the story, at turns poignant and outrageous, of a familyandrsquo;s dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Idi Aminandrsquo;s Uganda, from Birmingham, UK, to Birmingham, Alabama, and traces the path of familial love, of obsession, and the passage of time and death through the perceptions of various family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, mysterious hermaphrodites, and a dubious polygamist. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, language, and national boundaries in ways few books of poems do, the speaker in the poems bristles with a kind of quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence. This is a powerful and unusual addition to Phoenix Poets.
Synopsis
Happiness,” Jonathan Swift wrote, is the quality of being well-deceived.” In this long-awaited second collection, Maggie Dietz investigates our sometimes near-sighted notions of happiness, interweaving loss and motherhood, the death of a parent, and the persistence of hope, in poems that are characteristically sharp-eyed, varied, and evocative. Her first book published in the series did unusually well, with positive reviews in prominent publications. In this new collection, Dietz does what Phoenix Poets poets do best: write beautiful poems on difficult subjects, looking head-on at problems and situations that a clever turn in a poetic line wont necessarily solve. The book is, in the words of one of our readers, a bracing, various pleasure to read.”
About the Author
Maggie Dietz is lecturer in creative writing at Boston University and assistant poetry editor for Slate magazine. She is coeditor of three books, most recently AnInvitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I
The Pharmacistand#8217;s House
First Wife
Midsummer
Second Wife
Agapanthus Is The Word
The Arrangement
The Ninth Floor
Morgendand#228;mmerung
Innocence
Mystery
Courtship, 1944
The Conquest of Happiness
Green
The Third Gender
Sweet Milk
Sleep, Wake, Sleep
Buffalo Milk
Late Afternoon
Hemma Remembers Two Cities
Hemma Remembers Disorder
Hemma Remembers Sickness
Bootcamp Vipassana
The End of Summer
II
Rivers
Birmingham, UK 1969
Night with the Vicar
Courtship, 1971
The Ninth Month
In the Garden
Sunday
Funeral
The Polygamistand#8217;s Buttons
Hoo
Dictionary
The Library Sale
Cambra
Marriage
Sleeping in the Walmart Lot, 1996
Pomegranate
Rain
CVS Pharmacy
Time
and#8217;79 BMW Stalls Again
City Aubade
III
Boll Weevil and the Make or Break
Belief Revision
Night
Appendix: Family Tree