Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006

by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Overview

“Genius. Voigt is a poet of knowledge, and knowledge in the living, messy world.”—Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World

To witness the maturation of a poet over time is one of the great pleasures of reading. Here Ellen Bryant Voigt gives us that narrative distilled and amplified, arranging selections from six previous volumes to culminate in transcendent recent poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393069822
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	214 KB

About the Author

Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of volumes of poetry, including Shadow of Heaven, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Messenger, a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Pulitzer Prize. Voigt was awarded the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, where she was subsequently elected a chancellor. Her poems have appeared in an array of national journals and anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     11
From Claiming Kin (1976)
The Hen     15
Harvest     16
Dialogue: Poetics     17
Stork     19
Damage     20
The Letter     21
The Visit     22
Snakeskin     23
Tropics     25
From The Forces of Plenty (1983)
Blue Ridge     29
A Fugue     32
The Happiness Poems     36
Talking the Fire Out     38
For My Father     44
Year's End     47
Liebesgedicht     49
Jug Brook     50
Sweet Everlasting     51
From The Lotus Flowers (1987)
The Last Class     57
Visiting the Graves     59
The Photograph     60
The Field Trip     61
The Trust     63
The Farmer     64
Bright Leaf     66
Amaryllis     68
Nightshade     70
The Waterfall     71
Dancing with Poets     73
Feast Day     75
Short Story     77
Stone Pond     79
The Lotus Flowers     80
From Two Trees (1992)
The Innocents     85
At the Piano     86
Variations: At the Piano     88
After Keats     93
Woman Who Weeps     94
Two Trees     96
Variations: Two Trees     98
Soft Cloud Passing     105
Effort at Speech     108
Song and Story     110
From Kyrie (1995) 113
From Shadow of Heaven (2002)
Largesse     153
Winter Field     155
Long Marriage     156
Lesson     158
Himalaya     159
High Winds Flare Up and the Old House Shudders     161
The Garden, Spring, the Hawk     162
The Art of Distance     177
Horace: Ode I.xxxiv     193
Autumn in the Yard We Planted     194
Practice     195
Messenger: New Poems (2006)
The Feeder     199
Deathbed     209
The Hive     210
Harvesting the Cows     212
Rubato     215
Redbud     225
The Tattered Dress     228
Prayer     229
Adagio     231
Messenger     232

Editorial Reviews

Consistently respected by her contemporaries, Voigt's quiet but often violently powerful poems of autobiography, pastoral and history have not always gained the broad attention they deserve. This seventh book (her first retrospective) may ensure that she gets it. Voigt's descriptive powers pop out first: a snake, for instance, is a "wrinkle coming toward me in the grass." Her anecdotes, scenic lyrics, parables and loosely structured sequences ask, however, to be judged for the ways in which they depict people-the poet, her husband, her sisters, their ailing and dying parents, or, in Kyrie (1995), the victims of the devastating flu epidemic of 1918. Voigt seems to know a lot about birds and bird-watching, and even more about the classical piano repertoire; these specialties further enliven the sensitive poems of domestic and wild spaces she has composed throughout her career, from a catalogue of birds early on to a recent "redbird fixed on the branch like a ripe fruit." Voigt's latest and most original poetry delves furthest into the human interior, finding-like a friendlier, warmer version of Voigt's longtime friend Louise Gluck-the hidden motives behind all human endeavor: "the past," she writes, "is not a scar but a wound;/ I've seen it breaking open." (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Voigt's latest represents a large body of work from a poet too little known. These poems convey a rare sense of motion from line to line, as in the dynamics of the piano music the poet often describes from the perspective of its player, with theme, variation, and the able use of those evocative Italian terms, like rubato and glissando. These qualities sweep the reader into a deeply felt natural and imagined world. Birds are familiars (grosbeak, chickadee) seen from below that land in meadows dense with life (old oaks and oleander) but with life's mutability inherently understood. Some of the best work here also documents the movement of families-as in a long, sequenced narrative following sons coming back from war less than whole and those dead from flu on the home front, circa 1919. For readers tentative about poetry, this large and varied collection is accessible, with language that is never falsely elevated but that takes pleasure in naming what it knows. Readers who enjoy such diverse contemporary poets as Maxine Kumin and Ted Kooser will find much to admire here, as will those who treasure the poems of an earlier generation (Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop come to mind). Recommended for large public and academic libraries, particularly those seeking to extend their contemporary poetry selections.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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