Synopses & Reviews
"The river is largely implicit here," writes Linda Gregerson about her acre of woods. Whether open to view or underground, her river maps communal fate: everything that lives is its direct dependent. The river can also bring infection; it is a branching repository for toxicity. It carries news, much of which is a litany of harm — recklessness, malice, failures of heart, and failures of attention — but the poems in WATERBORNE somehow extract from adversity a syntax of devotion."The past / that has a place for us will know us by / our scattered wake," Gregerson also writes. The resilient tercets in which these poems are written might themselves be thought of as a scattered wake - the luminous record of movement through various lives. These stirring poems can be considered tools for staging daily rescues from oblivion. Their occasions are diverse - a barn fire, a wounded deer, a child's determined struggle with a bicycle - but their instinct is always to wrest from the impure world a vernacular of praise. As Mark Strand has written, "Linda Gregerson's poetry is among the very best being written."
Synopsis
A stirring, brilliantly crafted collection, Linda Gregerson's third volume of poetry examines mortality in all its beauty and horror. Fluently rendered in Gregerson's distinctive three-line stanzas, these poems explore subjects from autism to genealogy to ecology. Their occasions are diverse -- a barn fire, a wounded deer, a child's determined struggle with a bicycle -- but their instinct is always to wrest from the impure world a vernacular of praise.
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
Contents
Eyes Like Leeks 1
Noah"s Wife 4
Cord 7
The Day-Breaking If Not the Full Sun
Shining on the Progresse of the Gospel
in New-England 10
Maculate 14
The Horses Run Back to Their Stalls 17
Double Portrait with American Flags 19
An Offering 25
Waterborne 26
Half Light 29
Pass Over 34
Narrow Flame 39
Petrarchan 40
Cranes on the Seashore 44
A History Play 48
Interior of the Oude Kerk,
Delft, with Open Grave 51
Chronic 55
Grammatical Mood 60