Sign-In
Cart
The Devotion Field
Paperback
Publisher Price: $13.95
ISBN13: 9781882295463
Publisher: Alice James Books
Published: Sep 1 2004
Pages: 65
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.26 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.48
Language: English
The experimental and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E influence is clear, yet The Devotion Field offers, in a number of urban elegies, more narrative and personal (though still political) detail than has been Keelan's habit. Full of cultural and social critique, the poems concern themselves with the artifice of language, the art of being and the art of art, the fragmentation and continuous flux of contemporary life. She employs trademark techniques: stream-of--consciousness, free association and associative leaps, in addition to a new emphasis on melody and musical phrasing.
Antique
She brought the teapot because it was broken
& broken still valuable,
A thing not available to her otherwise.
On its restored surface a pastoral
Flickered once. Too late.
She was not honest but she was a poet
Mending the broken valuable . . .
What absolute nonsense! cried the Earthworm.Nothing
Is ever all right in the end and well you know it.
Poor Earthworm, Ladybug whispered,
Loving all that is disaster
Bellydown breathing with it everafter.
Claudia Keelan's The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, 'dog food and soil, ' 'dust and bits of paper, ' flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. 'Into the possibilities of the next page, / Or more nearly, another day.' The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.--John Ashbery
Claudia Keelan is the author of three previous prize--winning collections of poetry. She teaches in the MFA and Ph.D. programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the editor of Interim.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover