Shift (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Merrin, Jeredith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226520641 ISBN 13: 9780226520643

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

Shift traces the love between two women over several years and explores the intricacies of family relationships. Jeredith Merrin's poems, moving from ecstatic love lyrics to poems of familial affection and damage, to grave, more mature love poems, are psychologically loaded and technically sophisticated. These poems convey a wonderful sense of the sexual and social complexity of human relationships.

About this title

About the Author

Jeredith Merrin is a professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. Her first book of poetry, Shift, was published by the University of Chicago Press.

From the Back Cover

Jeredith Merrin's Shift is aptly titled---from the first page we are tilted, spun, and swept away on waves of waking dream. Time is banished and the spaces inhabited by families and lovers are rebuilt in the subtle architectures of memory. Jeredith Merrin is master of the space, velocity, and lost gravity of our longing: she is a natural painter, an intuitive and astonishing lyric poet.

Reviews

"Over and over, I've broken my life,/ as a child breaks a toy/ to see how it works...," Merrin states in this fine first collection. Self-examination sparks many of the poems here, even when Merrin is writing of family members or her female lover. In "Big Sister," she sketches a portrait of her sister's stormy life and their strained relationship, asking: "What happened to us,/ what did I do, while/ I was saving myself?" Merrin remembers her deceased stepfather in "Blackmail," realizing "...I have not yet let him be/ through with failing to be what I want,/ my father...." The book's final poems focus on Merrin's lover who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Their ordeal prompts Merrin to note: "When Chance grips big things, you control the small./ And here's that tired, self-reflexive trope/ the poet shaping print, a little god." In these quiet, introspective poems, Merrin generously shares what she has learned from her experience.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226520641
• ISBN 13: 9780226520643
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 86