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

Ansel, Talvikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300070322 ISBN 13: 9780300070323

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Talvikki Ansel for My Shining Archipelago.

"Ansel`s poetry is refreshingly original," says the distinguished poet and contest judge James Dickey. "She renders the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed, the lurking, the waiting to happen. This is true imagination, true craft."

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

Review

Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, and many other excellent poets came to national prominence early in their careers through the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The 1996 winner, chosen by James Dickey, was Talvikki Ansel. Dickey writes that Ansel's poems evoke "the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed." The writing is beautiful, and often plays with the space between expectation and reality, as in "In Fragments, In Streams." Ansel writes: "Haley's Comet crossed the jungle sky / that April, six mornings in a row / I woke to hike out to a clearing / and never saw it." The constant expectation of "days fading / in and out of showers," the shock of biting into an apple seed ("almond taste / cyanide, the bitter hint, liqueur taste"), and other revelations of the natural world fill these pages.

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.

About this edition

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