The Squanicook Eclogues - Hardcover

Green, Melissa

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393024555 ISBN 13: 9780393024555

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1988

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Four poems deal with the relationship of a father and his daughter, a man's fear of blizzards, a young woman reading her grandmother's diaries, and the story of a house and its family

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About the Author:

Melissa Green is the recipient of both the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three books: The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton, 1988), Color is the Suffering of Light (Norton, 1995), and Fifty-two (Arrowsmith, 2007). She has recently finished Akeldama, a book-length lyrical work about Heloïse and Abélard. Her poems have appeared in journals including The New Republic, AGNI and the inaugural issue of Little Star. Green lives beside the sea in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her collection Daphne in Mourning is also available from Pen & Anvil.

From Library Journal:

Green's four long pastoral poems (modern adaptations of the eclogue) combine family memories, local history of the river Squanicook (in Massachusetts), evocative Keatsian imagery ("a tree frog in the apple,/ a kit fox dozing in the brush"), and botanically accurate sketches: "rusty dogwood, tiled in ragged, reptilian plates . . . with its fuschia-colored, knuckled nodes." Compassion for her father, joy in crafted verse, and fidelity to place shine through stilted embellishments: "Ceremonious maples don the cardinal robes of kings." She works in the spirit of the craftsmen ("housewrights") who built the clapboard, mortise-and-tenon, soffits, wainscot, and floors "like planks of gold" of her ancestors. "This verse I've tried to plane/ for strangers . . . this home I build, the labor of my life." Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean. , Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
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