Cities of Memory (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Softcover

Hinsey, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300066740 ISBN 13: 9780300066746

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Poems set in European cities including Rome, Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna evoke the ambience of places that have experienced violence and sorrow amidst their artistic splendor

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Hinsey, the winner of the 1995 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition (for the best first collection by an author under the age of 40), is a Massachusetts native who lives in Paris. A transcultural perspective?that of a sensitive, knowledgeable outsider?informs her work, which, with deft, understated lyricism, draws on European history and art. Her form is naturally elegant, favoring loosely syllabic lines and stanzas like couplets and quatrains. Though her tone is mature and distanced, her observations can be starkly intimate: in an evocation of Beethoven's death in "March 26, 1827," stylish Austrian mourners give way to an acknowledgment that music itself felt the loss: "it was sound/ that wept." Hinsey's scope of the continent is remarkable, encompassing chilling wartime poems that employ the literal landscape ("The Approach of War"), recent political events like the construction of the Berlin Wall and a knowledge of European painting. Within this latter group, trees by Van Gogh are "querulous as archaic speech," and the aesthetic, visionary process quietly explored ("a palette like a landscape/ can grow too small..."). This collection has a shimmering, timeless quality that apprehends the visitor's idea of Europe?its mirage on the horizon.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This year's winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, the Paris-based Hinsey, writes poems deeply inspired and informed by European culture and history. As befits the gravity of the subject matter of many of these poems, the language is limpidly elegiac, somber, yet deftly evocative of the intellectuals and events that have shaped 20th-century consciousness: Freud, the Berlin Wall, the War, Russian poets. Writing from a more historically conscious perspective than most of her contemporaries, Hinsey frequently returns to one of the terrible paradoxes of our time: how the "everyday rituals" of ordinary life can coexist, even collaborate, with great evil and destruction. Yet she also celebrates the powerfully redemptive power of art, what she calls "the idiom of the place": the markings and monuments that are a nation's legacy and how, through them, "the touch of time stays with us as we look." Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.?Christine Stenstrom, Brooklyn P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0300066740
• ISBN 13: 9780300066746
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 84