Ghost in a Red Hat: Poems - Hardcover

Warren, Rosanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393080064 ISBN 13: 9780393080063

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

"An important poet . . . beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets."―Harold Bloom

In her fifth book of poetry, Rosanna Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. Starting from a childhood memory of her mother, the poems contemplate wreckage and sorrow in family life, in Hurricane Katrina, and in the Trojan War, but also moments of eerie blessing.

from "Mediterranean"
     There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve,
     some question she hadn't answered,
     and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me
     it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was
     not that she walked there, ten years after her death,
     but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place-

About this title

About the Author

Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Warren's fifth book of poetry spans a wide range of topics, from classical mythology to personal traumas to both real and imagined histories. Warren approaches each subject with great directness. "I am willing to be rewritten," she says, and, "as long as the danger lived outside/ me I couldn't write it." These poems struggle to take others' pain in and then articulate it. One group of poems remembers her friend the poet and editor Deborah Tall: "We touched hands, touched cheeks, as much/ to ascertain we still had bodies as to show/ the courtesies of separation." Warren revives Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who famously designed Central Park, with the same intimacy she uses to recall memories of her loved ones in the extended meditation "Earthworks," which intertwines Olmsted's biography with quotes from Emerson's essays. And while the book is often elegiac, the poems are not without a kind of dark humor: "I still have one good eye, and when I squint,/ you wouldn't believe what I see." (Mar.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393080064
• ISBN 13: 9780393080063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 107