In Darwin's Room (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Greger, Debora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143131311 ISBN 13: 9780143131311

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2017

Synopsis

An artful new collection from a poet who sees the extraordinary within the everyday

In her tenth volume of poetry, Debora Greger looks outward from the broadmindedness of the interior. Whether she finds herself in Venice, in London, or young again in the sagebrush desert of her childhood, the reader may feel Greger is both there and not there—her landscapes are haunted by memory, even in the act of experience. Not shying from the raw or savage in life, not ignoring the small moments of salvation or grace, she finds in every room an entrance to another world. Darwin’s college quarters prove not far from his cabin on the Beagle. A dress shop in Virginia reveals itself a Federal parlor through which a battle of the Civil War was fought. Returning to old scenes with a new eye, Greger proves herself a poet of quiet cunning, of grand scenes and small awakenings.

About this title

About the Author

Debora Greger is the author of nine previous books of poems. She has won, among other honors, the Grolier Prize, the Discovery/The Nation Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Florida and in Cambridge, England.

Review

“[Greger] is an old-fashioned poet with a modern eye, bewitching in her handling of the ordinary and without a trace of opacity . . . In a collection chock-full of endearing literary references and lexical mastery, Greger manages to conjure an eternal present that reverberates with times past.” 
-- Publishers Weekly

“Greger celebrates the ordinary and extraordinary through the lenses of science, art, and history. . . her vocabulary is fresh and true. . . A collection to be savored and read again and again.”
--Library Journal 

Praise for the work of Debora Greger
 
“An exemplary Greger poem occurs to the ear as a striking painting does to the eye: the
particulars of its composition emerge only after the first thrill of the whole.” —The Harvard Review
 
“Greger's poems are like the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts: one’s attention
drifts from the text itself to the spectral arabesques, the gold-leaf aura.” —Poetry
 
“Greger's is a poetry that makes us hear what it wants us to see. She stalks the language,
beating it out of the wilderness, tracking it through a labyrinth of image and allusion.” —The Hudson Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0143131311
• ISBN 13: 9780143131311
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128