Author: Connie Voisine
File Type: pdf
The Bird is Her ReasonThere are some bodies that emerge into desire as a godrises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothesthis want is like entering that heated redon the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makesmy teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window,edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wildflip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye.Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisines female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de Frances tragic heroines, but whereas Maries poems are places where womens longings quickly bloom and die in captivityin towers and dungeonsVoisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affairs end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the NorthVoisines poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.Denise Duhamel, Ploughshares**ReviewWhether its a crowded New York subway, a truckstop in Tennessee, or a cheap hotel in the South of France, each place Voisine takes on in these heart-grabbing poems suddenly reveals both its most dangerous and its most thrilling core. These poems constitute a lyric chronicle of the exhilaration and difficulty of making ones way in a world by turns so generous and so stingy. One way or another, each of them charts the old fashioned, struggling with grace. (Jacqueline Osherow 2007-09-04) Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream generates and sustains a momentum all its own. Centered firmly in a sensibility both rare and high, it is as down to earth as what we all walk on.Its a book I wont be able to read enough times. (James McMichael 2007-07-20) Connie Voisine is that raritya lyric poet of the highest order who is also a wonderful storyteller.She has mastered the narrative poem with a fierce precocity, infusing her lines with a dark, shimmering music and employing a variety of voices, all perfectly pitched.From the stunning First Taste, rich and compressed as a novella, to the staccato imagery of her shorter poems, she is a poet of transport, of transformative journeys, from the lower depths of Manhattan to the open highways of the West.This is a brilliant collection from a poet with a long career before her, and I shall treasure it. (Nicholas Christopher 2007-10-15) About the AuthorConnie Voisine is associate professor of English at New Mexico State University and director of La Sociedad para las Artes, an arts outreach organization. She is the author of Cathedral of the North, which received the Associated Writing Programs poetry award.**