"Formally
engaged and linguistically rich, these are poems that sing,
that stop you in your tracks, that make you want to read
them to other people and share what has come as a pure gift."
— America Magazine
"...this is the poet
at her best, and the poems collected here allow us to see
her treat her strongest subject—, love, and at every
age — over the course of a career that remains vibrant."
— Harvard Review
Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought
both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry's poetry,
on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems.
With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form,
and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing
that coheres into a single, seamless work. In it she responds
to the natural world, to philosophical dilemmas, to spiritual
longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and,
most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes
searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse
a new, bright prospect, a "green place" on a farm in Virginia
where time slows and holds and happiness abides.
The kind of day
when everything is so still
it seems to be an image of itself,
a mirrored photograph,
and only the secret lives of insects,
intense and determined among the leaves and grass,
enact the motivations of the real.
In this shadowless light
of uncontaminated noon, a fence post
gleams as if gilded, church spire where there is no church.
The impossibly beautiful blossoms of the crab apple
have spilled onto the ground,
an imperturbable pool of pink and white.
This illusion of the real, almost real.
From "In the Field" published in Hazard
and Prospectby Kelly Cherry.
Copyright © 2007 by Kelly Cherry. All rights reserved.
Kelly Cherry is the author of seventeen books of
poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (criticism, memoir, and essay),
including the poetry collections God's Loud Hand, Death
and Transfiguration, and Rising Venus. Eudora Welty
Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita
in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,
she lives with her husband on a small farm in Virginia. |
