Placebo Effects: Poems (National Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Beaumont, Jeanne Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039304128X ISBN 13: 9780393041286

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1997

Synopsis

The winner of the 1996 National Poetry Series, a first collection of poetry mixes introspection and graceful observation, treating such subjects as medicine and mysticism, commonplace but extraordinary objects, and the privacy of falling asleep.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeanne Marie Beaumont lives in New York City.

Review:

All of the high spirits, deep feeling, and wide wordwitchery that we expect from poetry are here in Jeanne Marie Beaumont's book--but a strict (and eccentric) formal consciousness fixes this dazzlement in place with pins of exactitude. One poem's speaker says 'there is no danger/of running out of material.' That's good news for the fans "Placebo Effects" will create. -- Albert Goldbarth

Arrangement
Barometrics
Childhood Of The Invisible Woman
City
Commerce
Continuing City
Contrariwise
Demure
Domestic Diary
Excavation
Female Navigation (1818)
The First Red Place
Found City
Frangipani
Gilt-edged Mirror
Journey
Judging The Book By Its Cover
The Last Blue Place
A Lesson: 1. Vocabulary
A Lesson: 2. Multiple Choice
A Lesson: 3. Conversationally Speaking
Magic Carpet
More Raw Data
Mr. Ripley Writes A Preface
Mrs. Ripley Gets It Off Her Chest
Objects In The Eye Are Closer Than They Appear
One
The Others
Pearl Hour
Photographing The Dols
Placebo Effects
Proxy
Road Trip
Rorschach
Shoe Speaks From Experience
Sleeping In Your House
Still
Stratum Corneum
Two Bowls: The Fish Speak
Two Bowls: The Woman Speaks
The Valley Of My Attention
Vase
Visual Field Test
Writ Of Ritual
The Yellow Dress
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

Imagine Alice swapping tales with Scheherazade in the late twentieth century and you have some idea of what Jeanne Marie Beaumont is up to. Every perceptive moment is an adventure and nothing is to be taken for granted. Fearless yet droll, she trusts the imagination as an arbiter of whatever grace we find in this world, and she exults in the pursuit of some very hard puzzlements. She is captivating. -- Baron Wormser

Jeanne Marie Beaumont's poems are smart and full of feeling, heartbrokenly in love with the snares and clarities of the language she writes in, and lit throughout by a kind of wry wonder. Here's a first volume to celebrate. -- William Matthews

The genius of "Placebo Effects" is a paradox: tactful but uncompromised paradox. Nothing is simple and everything is clear. The American composer Charles Ives honored Emerson for having 'accomplished the impossible in attempting it and still leaving it impossible.' Honor is likewise owing to Jeanne Marie Beaumont, our new poet of transcendent daring. -- Donald Revell

There is nothing imaginary in the salutary joy of reading "Placebo Effects." It is varied and lush, vigorous and charming. It is a multilayered harmony of observation and imagination, where the unknown is recognizable, the known is made magical....Like all great things, these poems reminded me of other treasures: intimate worlds which have always been there but are often forgotten. -- Literal Latte, May/June 1998

This collection of beguiling poems, one of the five winners of the 1996 National Poetry Series, takes as its avenue into experience the palpable, quotidian objects of the intimate environment.... There is something of the child's wondrous way of seeing the world that electrifies Beaumont's point of view, the way a child might see a group of children on their sleds in a snowy Currier and Ives scene on a lampshade, and wishes he could slide too, when all an adult sees is the burnt-out lightbulb. -- Boston Globe, David Mehegan, 1 October 1997

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 039304128X
• ISBN 13: 9780393041286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 86