The Master Letters: Poems - Softcover

Brock-Broido, Lucie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679765999 ISBN 13: 9780679765998

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1997

Synopsis

The title of this richly textured book derives from two of the three mysterious letters left by Emily Dickinson--the ones addressed to "Dear Master." Lucie Brock-Boido has imagined a series of letters echoing devices found in Dickinson's own work. "We feel we are in the presence of something entirely new, " says Bonnie Costello in The Boston Review. "Not even Brock-Broido's wonderful first book, A Hunger, prepares us for this bold encounter."

About this title

About the Author

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of an earlier book of poems, A Hunger (1988). From 1988 to 1993 she was a Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University. She has taught also at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Priceton University, and is now director of poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Am Moor"

Am lean against.
Am the heavy hour

Hand at urge,
At the verge of one. Am the ice comb of the tonsured

Hair, am the second
Hand, halted, the velvet opera glove. Am slant. Am fen, the injure

Wind at withins,
Stranger where the storm forms a face if the body stands enough

In a weather this
Cripple & this rough. Am shunt. Was moon-shaped helmet left

In bog, was condition
Of a spirit shorn, childlike & herd. Was Andalusian, ambsace,

Bird. Am kept.
Was keeper of the badly marred, was furious done god, was

Patient, was bad
Luck, was nurse. Ninety badly wounded men lay baying

In the reddened reedy
Hay of Saxony, was surgeon to their flinch & hoop, was hospice

To their torso hall,
Was numinous creature to their dying

Off. Am numb.
Was shoulder & queer luck. Am among.

Was gaunt.
Was--why--or the mutton & moss. Was the rented room.

Was chamber & ambage
& tender & burn. Am esurient, was the hungry form.

Am anatomy.
Was the bleating thing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679765999
• ISBN 13: 9780679765998
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96