Synopses & Reviews
An artful, compelling new collection from “a special poet in every sense” (Poetry) The poems in Debora Greger’s new book journey from Florida to England to Venice, finding in the byways and accidents of travel the ghostly presences that mark the poet’s passage from youth half-forgotten to the edge of old age: the younger self that, like some heroine in Henry James, she catches glimpses of and barely recognizes; the long-dead poets unable to sleep, with things still on their mind. The elegies threaded through this mature, startling book recognize life moving toward the shadows—these are poems of old responsibilities and new virtues, looking back as a way of looking forward.
Review
[Greger] stalks the language, beating it out of the wilderness, tracking it through a labyrinth of image and allusion. (
The Hudson Review)
Review
Praise for Debora Greger: “An exemplary Greger poem occurs to the ear as a striking painting does to the eye: the particulars of its composition emerge only after the first thrill of the whole.” —
The Harvard ReviewSynopsis
An artful, compelling new collection from a special poet in every sense (Poetry)The poems in Debora Greger s new book journey from Florida to England to Venice, finding in the byways and accidents of travel the ghostly presences that mark the poet s passage from youth half-forgotten to the edge of old age: the younger self that, like some heroine in Henry James, she catches glimpses of and barely recognizes; the long-dead poets unable to sleep, with things still on their mind.The elegies threaded through this mature, startling book recognize life moving toward the shadows these are poems of old responsibilities and new virtues, looking back as a way of looking forward.
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Synopsis
New from Debora Greger??a special poet in every sense? (Poetry)In her eighth book of poetry, Debora Greger travels not just the present but the past, looking for some strange place to call home. She takes a taxi to Stonehenge. She writes letters to Li Po and Tu Fu, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, always seeking out the beast that is man and the beast that is woman. She explores both the remoteness of the past (those radioactive fifties that were her childhood), and the weight of it?or, better, the responsibility of it. These modern traveler?s tales?musing, insistent, marvelous?place one woman?s collection of pasts into a world inhabited by Horace, Chekhov, the bank vault of England, and the giant octopus of Puget Sound.
Synopsis
In her seventh book of poetry, Debora Greger walks out of art history class and into Europe, even to the edge of Asia. A night wedding in Venice, an encounter with a girl on an aqueduct in Istanbul, a walk into the emptiness of the Florida prairie, standing before a Rembrant or a tomb in Ravenna?these portraits of travel reveal a poet never at home even when home. Debora Greger?s poems love the accident of discovery; she is a poet whose intimacies are expressed in whispers, whose secrets come in sidelong glances.
Synopsis
God has retired to Florida, like everyone else. He can't sleep. He watches TV. In the long poem that opens Debora Greger's sixth book, God, he has retreated to the swamps, where, in the lush particulars of the subtropics, a singular moral world is discovered. Wherever Greger is, she has a traveler's eye; her poetry finds the past beneath the present-where the "Eden of Florida," as the last poem ironically calls it, is an Eden with alligators. This is the work of a powerful, meditative poet, whose God is deceptively quiet, perfectly timed, and seriously amused.
About the Author
Debora Greger is a poet and professor who has won grants and awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim foundation. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Paris Review.
Table of Contents
God God in Florida
Easter 1991
The British Museum
To a Blackbird
Miranda on the British Isles
British Rail
The Ruined Abbey
The Allotment Garden
The Twilight of England
A Property of the National Trust
Memoirs of a Saint
Eve at the Paradise
The Zoo in the Rain
The Overland Bus
The Laurel Tree by the River
To the Snow
Moss in the Hamptons
There Now
The Dead of Summer
Head, Perhaps of an Angel
Variante de la Tristesse: The Sadness of the Subtropics
Admiral of the Parking Lot
Persephone in the Underworld
The Civil War
Subtropical Elegy
The Eden of Florida