Selected Poems (The ^AOxford Poets) - Softcover

Satyamurti, Carole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192881019 ISBN 13: 9780192881014

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

This new volume presents a selection of poems drawn from Satyamurti's three acclaimed collections--Broken Moon, Changing the Subject, and Striking Distance. They range from poems about the small, important victories of people attempting to deal with loss or deficiency in their lives, to a bitter sequence about the sinking of the ferry, The Herald of Free Enterprise.

About this title

About the Author

Carole Satyamurti lives in London and lectures in Sociology at the University of East London.

From Booklist

Although Satyamurti habitually writes about loss, frustration, and stress, her wit and craft shape the sickness, death, divorce, breakup, injustice, and accident in her poems into occasions of balanced wisdom. Rarely does a poem leave one depressed or angry. Instead, it usually imparts a refreshing sense of natural human limitation and the futility of despair. Sometimes the circumstances of the poem are indeed horrifying, as in the suite of poems in which a mother regards her disabled daughter. Sometimes they are relatively trivial and resolved comically, as in "On Not Being a Nature Poet," or even cozily, as in "Night Harvest," about the unsuccessful effort to recall dreams. Only very seldom does tragedy admit no resolution for Satyamurti, as in the sequence responding to the 1987 capsizing of a passenger ferry with the loss of 193 lives, "Sister Ship," the last line of which admits that anger outlasts grief. The best quality of Satyamurti's poems is their essentiality--not a word in them seems superfluous. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192881019
• ISBN 13: 9780192881014
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128