Begin Again: Collected Poems - Hardcover

Paley, Grace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126429 ISBN 13: 9780374126421

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

The collected poems-some never previously published-of one of our best-loved, most respected authors.

Combining Grace Paley's four previous collections and new unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of this direct, attentive, never predictable poet. Whether she describes the vicissitudes and pleasures of life in New York City or the hard beauty of her adoptive rural Vermont, whether she celebrates the blessings of friendship or protests against social injustice, her poems brim with the compassion and tough good humor that have made her stories and essays famous.

About this title

About the Author

Grace Paley's Collected Stories (FSG, 1994) was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award. She lives in Vermont.

Reviews

Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) has stood for decades among America's most cherished short-story writers. Her poems retain the winning openness, the whimsy and the political commitments her fiction flaunts. They also contain deep insights about narrative and voice: "A Poem about Storytelling" explains, "the first person is often the lover who/ says I never knew anyone like you/ The listener is the beloved She whispers/ Who? Me?" The poems can carry her readers through the poet's traumas, astonishments, and exclamations: when she says "Oh! the five exogamous boroughs of/ our beloved home New York," that adjective invites her readers to love it too. Poems address locales in New York City and Vermont; consider generational succession and old age; advocate an energetic acceptance of difference and diversity; and dwell on particular political struggles. (Some of the poems about Vietnam and El Salvador stick perhaps too closely to their occasions.) Her cadences and preoccupations can suggest a much slighter, and sunnier, Adrienne Rich. But in contrast to Rich, much of Paley's poetry seems unfinished, jotted-down rather than carefully made. Her lines give revelations without contexts, theses without examples, ends and beginnings without their middles: the poem "Life" reads, in its entirety: "Some people set themselves tasks/ other people say do anything only live/ still others say/ oh oh I will never forget you event of my first life." And too many lines become unadorned tracts: "It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes." Fans of the fiction will want these unguarded looks at the illimitably appealing Paley persona. And even those not already charmed by Paley's prose ought to enjoy her few best poems: an account of "twenty-two tranvestites/ in joyous parades" on Mother's Day; the superbly constructed, vertiginous "Leaflet"; the heartbreaking "On the Deck," about old age; a six-line apocalypse called "psalm." (Feb.)
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While this volume of Paleys poetry contains new, unpublished work, it might well be termed a retrospective insofar as it traces the writers poetic career through four previous collections, the first from back in 1985, with poems of even earlier vintage included. Though perhaps better known for her short prose and essays, one compilation of which (The Collected Stories), was a finalist for the 1994 NBA, Paley has gradually expanded her repertoire into verse. Born in the Bronx and educated in New York public schools, she makes use of these influences in a style that is often coarse and gutsy yet always compassionate and frequently leavened with humor. Later poems include wonderfully evocative images of the writers adoptive home in rural Vermont. A popular lecturer and workshop leader, Paley has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Dartmouth, and City College, and her involvement in the peace movement and in feminist causes over the past four decades, arising in part from a history of activism in her family, often burbles to the surface. At times, in fact, were fairly inundated by it, as when she enumerates rocket, bomb, and napalm attacks on a Vietnamese village in a bludgeoning manner few poets of the time managed to avoid. Shes in top form, however, when she sets aside the intellectual polemics and observes quietly. In one poem she describes a Vietnamese child speaking to his father who, unhearing, remains engrossed in the mosaic of three ships on the wall of a Brooklyn subway station. The few examples of Paleys didacticism on behalf of the causes she espouses may be overlooked in favor of her more general instruction by poetic example. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374126429
• ISBN 13: 9780374126421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208