My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Softcover

Ansel, Talvikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300070322 ISBN 13: 9780300070323

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition
 
Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, “Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism—more, always more, in the Amazon basin.” This cycle of “freewheeling sonnets” (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things—Shakespeare’s Caliban—is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.
 
Flemish Beauty
 
Yesterday, all winter,
I had not thought of pears, considered:
pear. The tear-shaped, papery core,
precise seeds. This one channeled
through with worm tunnels.
Bruises, a rotten half—
sometimes there’s nothing left
to drop into the pot.

                                  That phrase
I could have said: “you still
have us . . . ”
                  The knife
slides easily beneath the skins,
top to base, spiraling
them away.

The insubstantial us.
It could as well be the pear
talking to the river, turning to
the grass (“you still have us”).
Besides, it’s just me
a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full
of peels)—and sometimes, yes, that
seems enough: a pear—
 
                                      this larger one,
yellow-green, turning to red:
“Duchess” maybe, “Devoe,”
or what I want to call it: “Flemish
Beauty.”
                 When I can’t sleep,
I’ll hold my hand as if I held
a pear, my fingers mimicking
the curve. The same curve
as the newel post
I’ve used for years, swinging
myself up to the landing, always
throwing my weight back. And always
nails loosening, mid-bound.

About this title

About the Author

Talvikki Ansel attended Connecticut College and received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and an M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, Poetry East, and Shenandoah. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University.

From the Back Cover

Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism, the never-failing imagination based on burning and burning out, death already quivering with rebirth, and behind that, death and rebirth again. More, always more, in the Amazon basin, as though God were helpless in this overconcentrated excess and created by necessity or compulsion: that, here, reality is compelled to be thus.

Reviews

Whether she is describing a pear ("The tear-shaped, papery core,/ precise seeds"), noting how her hairs falls in her eyes as she dissects a bird ("Inside out/ the wing's white bone/ juts up"), explaining how her mother cut off the top of an egg "with one swift crunch," or observing "The bright painted crosses/ on the steepest banks" in the Amazon River Basin, Ansel has a great sense of physicality, exact, strenuous, and totally unsentimental. The poems in her first book, the winning volume in the Yale Younger Poets series for 1996, are detailed and densely descriptive, but they don't feel lush; they're much too matter-of-fact. The poems move purposefully from bird hunting in the Amazon to a panicked deer hunt in the northern woods to a "shining archipelago" in a cobalt-blue sea but remain rooted in the world. Ansel's cool, clinical tone may startle?we're far from Wordsworth's daffodils here?but the poems contains riches that can be plundered again and again. For most poetry collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300070322
• ISBN 13: 9780300070323
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70