Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems

The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems

Brebner, Diana
Bolster, Stephanie

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry, Book 15

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773528350
ISBN13: 9780773528352
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Nov 26 2004
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.02 Depth: 7.44
Language: English

Blood Oranges

we talk on the phone, a black wire is strung

us, heavy with ice, and somehow we know

must speak the condensed code of last words,

referring, out of love, or fear, to the end.

'm in my kitchen with the phone caught, like a violin,

chin and shoulder, but with my hands freed.

listen. I cut into the pliant flesh of oranges, bought

past week at a store you will likely never see.

fruit is identified, like a painting, with provenance,

(Serena, Valencia)

are always in the middle of life, looking forwards and backwards; the only movement we can make to defy physics and history is the journey of the spirit. The Ishtar Gate, a ceremonial gate from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, reconstructed and housed in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, is my personal symbol for the merging of ancient and modern culture, the old goddess-centred religions and the scholarly, rational West. So wrote Diana Brebner of the book she planned to write. Though cancer claimed her life before she could complete this project, she wrote some thirty poems towards it. Here is a poet in extreme control of her craft: the aesthetic refinement, the musicality of language, the spiritual vision, and the playfulness that drew readers to Brebner's previous award-winning books - Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna - resonate with even greater force in her last poems. The elements - earth, air, water, and fire - are all here. And the voice is singular, full of elegance and abandon, an Old World respect for art and history and a New World desire for wilderness and adventure. From within the Ishtar Gate, we see a canoe on a northern lake, a scene from Vermeer, a line by Sylvia Plath, a Polaroid image of a heart, a jar of orange marmalade, a frozen Aphrodite in a field of snow. In this place of beauty and danger, the poems live. The Ishtar Gate testifies to Brebner's belief in the indefatigable forces of poetry and imagination.

Also in

General Poetry

View All