Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry) - Softcover

Kinsolving, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136052 ISBN 13: 9780802136053

Publisher: Grove Press, 1999

Synopsis

“The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them.” — Susan Cheever

“Susan Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself — and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there.” — J. D. McClatchy

“What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving’s poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air.” — Anthony Hecht

“‘Things just are,’ Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision.” — Grace Schulman

“In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls ‘an oblique sublimity’ which is also the hallmark of her art.” — Edward Hirsch

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Dailies & Rushes

"The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them."-Susan Cheever

"Susan Kinsolving's poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day's figures and memory's pattern. But she's headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself-and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well-triumphantly there."-J. D. McClatchy

"What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving's poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air."-Anthony Hecht

"'Things just are,' Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision."-Grace Schulman

"In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls 'an oblique sublimity' which is also the hallmark of her art."-Edward Hirsch

Susan Kinsolving was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and the Yale Younger Series award. She has taught at California Institute of the Arts and the University of Connecticut.

Reviews

Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving's debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot. In a familiar, no longer New York School blend of the quotidian and the quixotic, she takes on international politics, the violent death of a relative and the classic urgency of losing and finding love; and yet it is the occasional searing private moment, and not the thematic scope, that makes many of these poems shine. The best, like "The Jellyfish" or "The Night Nurse," strike to the heart of an ironic or Plath-like conundrum: "'These are your numbers,' she soothes. 'You must/ not refuse. The hospital provides them free/ of charge and we can insert them without leaving/ scars.'" Often it is the half-buried pun that satisfies here rather than her more overt word-play, and similarly, the poems frequently end with a ponderous last line that sometimes works, and sometimes comes off belabored: "I hear/ the closing door as it has never closed before." Kinsolving's tone can indeed be lofty, speaking of death as "the great weight of being," and the frequent repetitions are often ineffective, coming off more as unwieldly struggles than as artifice. But in her impressively stylized constructions and "more than meets the eye" depths (well explored in Richard Howard's rapt introduction) there remains a mutable, complex imagery ("The sick float past their bloodsteams into an evening of smooth lakes") giving even the more uneven pieces an ambivalent appeal.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This remarkable debut proclaims its edginess everywhere. In verse precise and elegant, Kinsolving declares everything here is at the / edge. She locates literal borders at the sea, in fields, on the interstate, along a fence; she also feels the prickliness of life lived at the extreme. Her short-line poems play with their margins, running a single word over into the next line; she enjambs with meaning and sly, internal rhymes. Vigorously female, Kinsolving speaks of the woe that is marriage: as many poems exult in love as document its loss. Our Fields finds the excessive growth of the field a metaphor for the lovers excess, both to be trimmed soon, and Leaving and In Preparation record her lovers deceitful leave-taking and her own. She finds precedent for her frantic love in Hardy, who knew the binding of loves horrible blade. Like Anne Sexton, Kinsolving goes to bedlam and back (though her hospital is not sylvan or Plath!). Her poems on madness obsess on worlds internal and the world far away, until she learns to be at home / in the haphazard. Renewed, she sings of zinnias, geraniums, forget-me-nots, and amaryllissexy and pure audacity. Later poems saunter through summer vacations, linger on her angelic daughters, and, in the delightful title poem, race on triplets about herself as a stunt woman, ready for anything, including, as another poem suggests, living her days unrehearsed. An amplitude of imagination directs this volume of descent and resurrection, and announces a poet of awesome talents and presence. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Every year, dozens of first books of poetry are published, some unremarkable, some surprisingly good, but just a few truly memorable. Kinsolving's first effort (save a collaboration with artist Susan Colgan) is such a book. How refreshing to encounter a poet who cannot be so easily defined, who moves from "a stick,/ wandering over snowdrifts/ cheerful and unassuming/ A Chaplin cane without Charlie" to a poem about a psychopath who counts the poet's uncle among his victims and ends thus: "amid the daily news/ of armies, viruses, and madmen, I act casual,/ fearing that my children are my prayers." Rather elegant, often ironic, and yet never offhand, these poems deliver their assessment in lucid and polished lines.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802136052
• ISBN 13: 9780802136053
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96