Ann Lauinger
Description
"This new collection from Ann Lauinger effectively has two title poems: there's the poem "Dime Saint, Nickel Devil" in which she announces she is "fat
...
ed to surrender to pure sense"; and a page later, the cover poem "Persimmons on the Ground" depicting "a world of so much ruined beauty" - "Look here / at decomposition. Speak, / if you speak, of fallen brilliance. Flesh and stars." As if this weren't enough for a program, her opening poem "Girl Reading the Aeneid on the Subway" throws the world of "myth and destiny" into the mix, and several of her poems bear titles of monastic prayers. Heady stuff, this. But Lauinger is up for it, and her observations and meditations - her "pondering" as she puts it - are infused with the pure sense of a fallen, sometimes tragic, but still beautiful world. The result is some of the most lush language you'll ever be thrilled to read, like these lines from the closing poem aptly titled "Collateral Beauty": "Here's another thing: sunset confuses me, / luxuriant dying that spreads like spilled paint / across night's visibly deepening design / and quickens the zenith with a frolicsome bestiary / doomed to the insatiable dark. / Yet a mere twelve hours later, in the pale / wash of morning, it's business as usual." A great part of the joy of this volume is how Lauinger gently instructs us in how to live in the face of mortality, to get on with the "business as usual" of life: "Our / alterations are subtractions / no raging star can possibly / restore. The stage is getting bare. / It's time to improvise.""--
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