Swallow: Poems: Poems – An American Debut Where Freedom and Vicissitude Dance Between the Wild and the Cultivated (Bakeless Prize) - Softcover

Field, Miranda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618189300 ISBN 13: 9780618189304

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

From the microcosmic wilderness of an overgrown back yard to the cool, glassed-in exhibits in a natural history museum, Swallow swoops and darts, tangling the lines we draw between the wild and the cultivated. In her debut collection, Miranda Field explores a world composed equally of shadow and substance, filled not just with beauty but also with a kind of savage experience. But Swallow is more than a crisscrossing of boundaries. It is an imperative, a dare: Go ahead, do as Eve did; let hunger take you wherever it will.
According to James Longenbach, these poems are "too beautifully made to idealize freedom, too much in love with vicissitude to idealize beauty. Read these poems, enter them, and be hungry forever."

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Miranda Field was born and raised in London. A winner of the Discovery/The Nation Award and a teaching fellow at the 2002 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. She lives in New York City and teaches writing programs at New York University and Barnard College.

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At the Edge of the Garden, a Tattooed Spider


The rosebush blooms extravagantly
all around her: Her roses,
her lightwires. The sun almost works

the wires, but sun's and rain's collision
at the equinox Þres this: the spider's sense
is she's alone, a woman in a window

up-tipping slowly her thimbleful of sound,
her held note: C on the cliff's edge
of the tempered scale. Now rain begins

to strum the web and make inþected
music-of-breaking-things, a song the sun
burns up. But there isn't the expected

rainbow, there's a stranger time
trapped in the trees. Beginning-evening
and departing-day peel away—

will this resolve full viable,
this hour between? The woman holds
her note, the web shudders, the spider waits:

not air, not rain on her ladder's rungs.
An always-climbing caller,
always calling something far-off closer.

Bright Ardor


The house beneath its sheath of roiled light
shimmers, a kind of bride. Almond trees
in front brocade the sky, air veils the doors
and windows: The lot runs
out from under us, a rained-on painting,
river of space. Under the Þlm
of heat the facade is a kind of cover,
coaxing and dissembling. It draws us in
and closes, and the contents run amok:
Ladders melt, stair rails cling red hot
and twisted to a wall. The rooms we want to enter
disappear, the way to them a turning vine,
impossible to climb, but þowering up and down,
blistering. Identities shift—families
of foxes under the beds, wolves in the attic,
a cat's cries turning human: Feed me,
Þll me with reprieve. A lifelike baby-doll
mimics a baby left behind, and the Þreman falls
for her, he gives the life she asks for, Þxed
imploring arms extended from the crib. Small hands
strike matches. Fevers þy out, furies
þy out from the place of gestation, of origin.
Like the white silk-satin of Taste not of the tree,
which is a furled bud in the wood that framed the house,
a locked thing longing for a key.

Copyright © 2002 by Miranda Field. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Houghton Mifflin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0618189300
• ISBN 13: 9780618189304
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 68
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland