Synopses & Reviews
In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence "as though to seize on a new life." Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth--in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation--and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief.
Review
"Warren, having studied painting at Yale, is at her best when she focuses upon painters, paintings, and landscapes. A particularly fetching passage from this impressive first collection reads, 'Unease among the oaks: massed leaves stirred / high from their hush, sheltered birds trilled / in cool and quickening air. I thought / that warbling might have saved us./ I was wrong.'" Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
In elegies of love and death, we learn the legacy of poet Max Jacob, and "the clarity of being alone," but also that we still have to touch to believe, and that love, to believe in itself, must dress up in death. Yet sources of the future are also brought tenderly to us through the image of an unborn daughter, a child's room in autumn, and the knowledge that "gene by gene, the tiny transcriptions continue."
About the Author
Rosanna Warren, the author of four collections of poetry, has received awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and has won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago.