The Last Girl: Poems - Softcover

Solari, Rose

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984832955 ISBN 13: 9780984832958

Verlag: Santa Fe Writers Project, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A shimmering girl who disappears in daylight. A boy who goes to war and comes back forever broken. New landscapes in which old ghosts appear, telling their bits of stories. Lovers and losses, visions and dreams—such are the people, places, and images who fill Rose Solari’s third collection of poetry, The Last Girl. Moving beyond the often-narrative constructions of her previous collection, the poems in this collection tell their truths slant-wise, in spiky, inventive lines that sing their way under the reader’s skin. Solari’s whole-hearted lyricism of her elegiac moments, linguistic inventiveness, and range of tones sweep the reader from dark to light, from pain to joy, from unbearable loss to giddy delight. The poems in this collection represent a writer working at the peak of her powers, possessed of technical mastery, fierce perception, and a tender but unsentimental heart.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rose Solari is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Difficult Weather and Orpheus in the Park; the one-act play, Looking for Guenevere; and a novel, A Secret Woman. She has lectured and taught writing workshops at many institutions, including the University of Maryland–College Park, the Jung Society of Washington, and the Centre for Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Her poems and essays have appeared in various magazines, journals, and anthologies. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and the Columbia Book Award. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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The Last Girl

Poems

By Rose Solari

Santa Fe Writers Project

Copyright © 2014 Rose Solari
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9848329-5-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
I. Then, 
Tree House of the Dream Child, 
Math and the Garden, 
Persephone at the Train Station, 
Young Couple at the County Fair, 
Boy on a Cross, 
Desert Light, 
A Prayer, 
Another Shore, 
Spell for Vanishing, 
Rochelle's Movie, 
To the Wine-Taster, 
Elegy for Her & Me, 
The Death of the Old Gods Is Not, 
Another Ending, 
II. Some Islands, 
Song for the Pitons, 
The Name of That Island Still Makes Me Sad, 
Island, With Goats, 
Greedy, 
My Expatriate Life, 
Once an Island, 
Hymn to Her, 
III. Now, 
The Last Girl, 
Somewhere Between Four and Five A.M., 
Scavenging, 
That Day, 
In Which Rochelle Realizes That Her Ex-Boyfriend Is the Devil, 
Sister Goat, 
Making, 
Fire Pit, 
To the Scholar of Mary Magdalene, 
Another Country, 
Who, What, When, 
Women in Translation, 
Myself When I Was There, 
Visiting Dora, 
Next Time, 
Stargazing, 
After All, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Then

Tree House of the Dream Child


    It has been here forever. Who
    built it, nobody knows. Time itself

    might have pressed these boards
    into rows, hammered home

    the nails. Nobody plays here.
    Neighborhood boys once hung

    their pennants from its windows,
    while girls slipped hand over hand

    up the rope ladder. How high
    the grass grows — no one lives

    around here anymore. Come
    with me as I walk the perimeter

    of this field, and don't be afraid.
    Though the earth is wild, nothing

    can hurt us here. And if we're lucky,
    if the light is good and a thousand

    other elements conspire, we might see,
    moving inside the one high room

    of the tree house, the dream child. Hear
    the floorboards singing her step, see

    her old, new face. Safe in those walls,
    plying her solitary art, she is a word

    for keeping and losing, a talisman
    against this sky, which is red-black,

    now, and terrible, and our own.


    Math and the Garden


    It's all a matter of threes or fours,
    like when my father died and it was
    him and me and what he called god
    and what I called whatever it was

    that was next, only please not yet.
    God won, which means that even if
    he doesn't exist, He does. And Dad does
    too, as river or beagle or five-year-old

    prodigy writing his serious stanzas
    in Latin. Which means, I guess,
    that meaning is already here.
    But I'm losing track. What I wanted

    to say has something to do with
    the dogwood, its four-petaled,
    center-white blossoming that I want
    every year to be more extravagant

    than it is. As if the garden could be
    compensation for some self-rising sap
    that thins, the green seasonally less
    insistent under the bud, despite all

    that fertilizer and mulch. After the last
    light rain in somebody's yard, the stars
    disbelieving themselves, what I saw
    on his face in that light was judgment

    and then some. Please, I'd ask him.
    Tell me again. I'm listening now.


    Persephone at the Train Station


    Pale from the indoor life
        of winter, she glides to the top

    of the moving stairs, blinks back
        the sun. A bag in each hand —

    one small, one heavy — she makes
        her slanting way to the concrete

    island, where other travelers shift
        and mutter. She'd forgotten how

    the daylight world, here, spins
        swiftly by. Beside the fountain, where

    nymphs and goddesses pour water
        from jar to jar, a pair of teenagers

    strum guitars and sing something
        about a hill, about climbing high above

    the city. Grab your things, the chorus goes,
        I've come to take you home. The word

    charges her heart two ways at once. In between
        is where she lives. When the white sedan

    rounds the circle, her shoulders lift, then
        fall, as if pulled by sky-strung cords.

    The door swings open, a woman's voice
        glints out, My girl. My girl. She is swept

    up and in. As they pull away,
        her eyes return to the young couple,

    who, above the roar of pouring
      water, begin another song.


    Young Couple at the County Fair


    They've already passed the pregnant woman,
    crouched and pleading, trying to bribe
    her sulking toddler with funnel cake.
    They've left behind the shooting gallery boys,
    aiming their toy rifles at a plastic sky.
    Inside the bubble of their delight, they sway
    through the crowd, sleek, and snagging
    the envious eyes.

        If she were any
    other girl, she might think it's fate,
    how easily she fits under his draped arm.
    If he were another...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Santa Fe Writers Project
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0984832955
• ISBN 13: 9780984832958
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 68
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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