Sign-In
Cart
Firebird
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN10: 1848619391
ISBN13: 9781848619395
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jun 1 2024
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.19 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781848619395
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jun 1 2024
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.19 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Firebird explores the fires of destruction and rebirth, both literal and spiritual. Each poem invites the reader to consider 'the necessity of mystery', where grief and joy, death and rebirth, stagnation and transformation exist alongside one another, 'exactly as they are'.
In two sections of ekphrastic poems, Em Strang engages with visual art by American painter and erstwhile nun, Meinrad Craighead, and Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio. The poems speak specifically to Craighead's 2004 Bosque Fire series - images made in the wake of a devastating fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived - and to a number of Caravaggio's religious paintings made between 1595 and 1609.Firebird is an invitation into a unitive perspective, where the source of all creation 'is a presence that protects us from nothing, even while it sustains us in all things' and where 'even if we burn to death, the fire is trustworthy' (James Finley). These are poems of radical love and courage in the face of ongoing fire.
Em Strang is that rare thing - a writer who can effortlessly combine contemporary issues - environment, climate change, identity, gender - with an interrogation of the seldom-visited spiritual hinterland of our lives. Her poetry displays astonishing depth - this is work that reaches far beyond the everyday into the fundamental importance of things. Each poem is like a little flame lit somewhere in us as we read. Firebird is the sort of poetry we really need today - gripping, essential and highly accessible; poems we can't help but visit again and again - built to last; made to be remembered. -John Glenday
Em Strang is that rare thing - a writer who can effortlessly combine contemporary issues - environment, climate change, identity, gender - with an interrogation of the seldom-visited spiritual hinterland of our lives. Her poetry displays astonishing depth - this is work that reaches far beyond the everyday into the fundamental importance of things. Each poem is like a little flame lit somewhere in us as we read. Firebird is the sort of poetry we really need today - gripping, essential and highly accessible; poems we can't help but visit again and again - built to last; made to be remembered. -John Glenday
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
$33.00
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
$19.94
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
$17.06
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
$18.05
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover
$24.70
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
$17.99