A spellbinding collection from one of America's most original and magical poets
Annie Finch's Spells brings together her most memorable and striking poems written over forty years. Finch's uniquely mysterious voice moves through the book, revealing insights on the classic themes of love, spirituality, death, nature, and the patterns of time. A feminist and pagan, Finch writes poems as "spells" that bring readers to experience words not just in the mind, but in the body. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft, over the course of her career Finch has shaped her own innovative and radically traditional aesthetic. Her strange but familiar metrical language decenters the Self, creating a new, more open emotional relationship between ourselves, other people, and the world. Spells displays Finch's virtuosity in a broad range of genres and forms, from lyrics, chants, and narrative poems to performance pieces, poetic drama, and verse translation. The book also includes a number of new and previously unpublished poems, notably her 1980s-era "Lost Poems," experimental work in meter that prefigures postmodern reclamations of poetic form. This wonderfully talented poet gives voice to the female and earth-centered spirituality of our era. Her emotionally eloquent and rhetorically powerful work will echo in the reader's ear long after the book is closed. Check for the online reader's companion at http://spells.site.wesleyan.edu.
Autorentext
Annie Finch
Klappentext
Annie Finch's Spells brings together her most memorable and striking poems written over forty years. Finch's uniquely mysterious voice moves through the book, revealing insights on the classic themes of love, spirituality, death, nature, and the patterns of time. A feminist and pagan, Finch writes poems as "spells" that bring readers to experience words not just in the mind, but in the body. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft, over the course of her career Finch has shaped her own innovative and radically traditional aesthetic. Her strange but familiar metrical language decenters the Self, creating a new, more open emotional relationship between ourselves, other people, and the world. Spells displays Finch's virtuosity in a broad range of genres and forms, from lyrics, chants, and narrative poems to performance pieces, poetic drama, and verse translation. The book also includes a number of new and previously unpublished poems, notably her 1980s-era "Lost Poems," experimental work in meter that prefigures postmodern reclamations of poetic form. This wonderfully talented poet gives voice to the female and earth-centered spirituality of our era. Her emotionally eloquent and rhetorically powerful work will echo in the reader's ear long after the book is closed. Check for the online reader's companion at http://spells.site.wesleyan.edu.
Inhalt
Preface NEW POEMS A Blessing on the Poets Homebirth Abortion Spell Your Land Stone and Cloth and Paper The Naming Frost's Grave Tarot: The Magician Card Keys Beach of Edges Earth Day Revelry Architecture POEMS, 2000 - 1990 Watching the Whale Paravaledellentine: A Paradelle Wild Yeasts Earth Goddess and Sky God • Conversation Calendars Over Dark Arches A Carol for Carolyn Chain of Women Ghazal for a Poetess Meeting Mammoth Cave, Eight Months Pregnant Butterfly Lullaby Intimations of Pregnancy Walk with Me Two Bodies Final Autumn Elegy for My Father Poems for the Wheel of the Year Samhain Winter Solstice Chant • Imbolc Dance A Seed for Spring Equinox A Wreath for Beltane Summer Solstice Chant Lammas A Mabon Crown Letter for Emily Dickinson A Dance for the Inland Sea Iowa Barn Bluet Landing Under Water, I See Roots Changing Woman Spider Woman The Furious Sun in Her Mane • Aphrodite Eve Inanna • Coatlique Nut Brigid Rhiannon Running in Church Blood Charm: From the Menstrual Hut Encounter Gulf War and Child: A Curse Being a Constellation My Raptor The Wish for Eyes The Last Mermother Tribute The Intellect of Woman Moon POEMS, 1989 - 1980 Courtship • Zaraf's Star Goddess Pearl Interpenetrate Strangers Insect The Grim Garden Inside the Violet Blue Willow Speak Softly The Door No Snake A Small Sound in the Dark Woods • From the Lost Poems Such Husks Now in November Song of the Sorry Side Awful Friend Nightmare Resolution Another Pregnant Woman Remembers Incest Tongue of Language Dusk Lesson from a Rock Reconciliation Bread • Night Rain Fawns An Imaginary Companion The Ages' Years: A Dialogue Harvest Seam Sundown Shallow Sky Childless Wrist-Bracelet Wine-Glass Woman Lady Bug A Wreath of Time She That From The Encyclopedia of Scotland Invocation One, from "Rockwood" • The Body of the Thing, from "Feeding the Admiral's Pussycat" POEMS, 1979 - 1970 The August Porch Spells A Dusk Song In Cities, Be Alert List • Still Life Coy Mistress When Daphne Ran Lucid Waking Sapphics for Patience Another Reluctance • A Way to See First Poem Caribou Kitchen PERFORMANCE WORKS, 1983 - 2010 • "Creation Story," excerpted and adapted from Sheba in Eden From The Mermaid Tragedy From Marina Tsvetaeva: A Captive Spirit From Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams From Wolf Song • TRANSLATIONS, 1978 - 2010 The Seafarer Louise Labé Sonnet 2 [Handsome Brown Eyes] Sonnet 5 [Bright Venus] Sonnet 13 [The Ivy and the Tree] Sonnet 4 [The Point of Death] Sonnet 16 [Impotence] Sonnet 18 [Kiss Me Again] Sonnet 19 [A Meeting with Diana] Sonnet 21 [Love Forces My Judgment] • Sonnet 23 [The Tangle] Anna Akhmatova The White Bird Cleopatra Lot's Wife • Andrée Chedid Thirst In Praise of Emptiness A Fragment of Sappho Acknowledgments