Driven to Abstraction
Rosmarie Waldrop
(Author)
Description
Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as it passes. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodies on the way to vast projects of war.--Rosmarie WaldropDriven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop's sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, "Sway-Backed Powerlines," consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop's most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.
Product Details
Price
$17.95
$16.69
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
November 30, 2010
Pages
144
Dimensions
6.0 X 8.9 X 0.4 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811218795
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Reviews
Rosmarie Waldrop is one of America's finest formalists. She is a poet capable of very direct address, of narrative when she wants it, of pointed humor, and of profound pathos. But her process of syntactic expropriation provides the open latticework across which her stunning lyrics creep.
One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry.
Rosmarie Waldrop should be recognized as a national treasure.
One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry.
Rosmarie Waldrop should be recognized as a national treasure.
