Mornings Like This: Found Poems - Softcover

Dillard, Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060927259 ISBN 13: 9780060927257

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1996

Synopsis

In Mornings Like This, Annie Dillard extracts and rearranges sentences from old--and often odd--books, and composes ironic poems--some serious, some light--on the heartfelt themes of love, nature, nostalgia, and death. Clever, original, sometimes humorous, and often profound, this collection is sure to charm her fans, both old and new.

About this title

About the Author:

Annie Dillard has written twelve books,including in nonfiction For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

From Booklist:

Dillard's earlier volume of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), contained the usual sort of poetry: poems written by the author. This volume is something altogether different. Dillard "didn't write a word of it." Found poems? Well, yes, except it's not that simple. Other found poetry consists of intact texts offered out of context. What Dillard has done is construct poems out of "bits of broken text" ; that is, she's lifted sentences and used them to create original poems on her own themes. So these are language collages, meticulous and surprisingly effective. Dillard found gems embedded in such unlikely and obscure sources as a boys' project manual, nineteenth-century scientific texts, and memoirs, and she has turned them into poems of wonderful resonance, some very moving, others quite funny. This rather arch endeavor, literary recycling if you will (and so postmodern), demonstrates just how much of poetry's power is in its reductiveness and juxtaposition. By liberating these lines--some so innocent and enthused, others, like the ones Dillard so delicately culled from letters by Vincent van Gogh, so beautifully poignant--Dillard has given them room to breathe and a second chance to make their rich presence felt. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0060927259
• ISBN 13: 9780060927257
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96