Synopses & Reviews
A magnificent new collection from National Book Award finalist and Kingsley Tufts Award winner Linda Gregerson
In eloquent poems about Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, the death of a father, a bombing raid in Lebanon, and in a magnificent series detailing Masaccios Brancacci frescoes, The Selvage deftly traces the “line between” the “wonder and woe” of human experience. Keenly attuned to the precariousness of our existence in a fractured world—of “how little the world will spare us”—Gregerson explores the cruelty of human and political violence, such as the recent island massacre in Norway and “the current nightmare” of war and terrorism. And yet, running as a “counterpoint” to violence and cruelty is “The reigning brilliance / of the genome and / the risen moon . . . ,” “The / arachnids exoskeleton. The kestrels eye.” The Selvage is the boldest evidence yet that Linda Gregersons unique combination of dramatic lyricism and fierce intelligence transcends current fashions to claim an enduring place in American poetry.
Synopsis
The poems in Selvage, Linda Gregersons first collection since her Kingsley Tufts Award winning Magnetic North, allude to Milton, to the great myths of Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, and include a magnificent series detailing Masaccios frescoes about the life of Saint Peter.
Synopsis
A magnificent new collection from National Book Award finalist and Kingsley Tufts Award winner Linda Gregerson
About the Author
LINDA GREGERSON is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vThe Selvage 1
Pajama Quotient 4
Slight Tremor 7
Constitutional 8
Slaters Measure 10
Catch 17
Lately, Ive taken to 21
Getting and Spending 25
-
Ariadne in Triumph 31
Theseus Forgetting 35
Dido Refuses to Speak 38
-
From the Life of Saint Peter 49
Her Argument for the Existence of God 58
Blink 61
Ovid in Exile 64
Varenna 67
“. . . More Instructive Than a Long Trip to Europe” 69
Still Life 72
Notes 79