A Wandering Island (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) - Hardcover

Kirchwey, Karl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069106847X ISBN 13: 9780691068473

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1990

Synopsis

A survivor of the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., an old man in his garden in upstate New York, a fourteenth-century Picard glazier, a modern city-dweller repainting his front hall--the speakers in these richly textured poems reflect on the culture of their own time and contemplate the enigma of home. Here Karl Kirchwey provides the reader with a synchronous vision of the ancient and the contemporary while illustrating the paradox of geographical fixity in a world of change. The poems use the formal resources of the modern syllabic and the classic hexameter, of free verse as well as the stanza forms of Herbert and Wordsworth. Their settings encompass French and Italian Switzerland, Sicily, Greece, rural New England, Manhattan, and London. Together the poems form an atlas of significant emotional range and terrestrial color.

For Allo (Sculpture from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, now in the British Museum)

It is as if the wind had flayed her woolen chiton from her, yet somehow she is clothed: neither in flesh nor stone. Has she been stripped by time, then, or the fury of her own movement? It starts up by her throat: a Y of sinuous folds descends between her breasts; then, magnified as roses are in fabric in a light summer dress, so that the lower blossoms are actually larger than those above, or as waves find their murderous amplitude through long movement at sea alone, or thought does, these too counter their direction, involving the whole body in their torque of contrary motion, so that the hem tosses in restless troughs, a single flange of vengeance floating in the way the mind does, and condemns itself in solitude.

About this title

Review:

"Winner of the 1990 Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America"

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 069106847X
• ISBN 13: 9780691068473
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104