The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

Randall, Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080711782X ISBN 13: 9780807117828

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Randall presents a distillation of her best work, some 200 poems altogether, ranging from three selections from her first book, The Solstice Tree (1952), to 26 new poems. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

Reviews

Spanning a 40-year career, this collection embraces early, somewhat self-absorbed reflections and Randall's ( Moving in Memory ) more authorative, outward-looking later work. In Romantic poems that praise a sense of place, she invokes her exemplars--Yeats, G. M. Hopkins and especially Wordsworth: "I have done nothing all day but stare / at the dishes, and read Wordsworth / on hiding-places, him who knew so well / what we see clear, but clumsily half-tell." Early poems are imitative and self-consciously aesthetic. But as Randall abandons the traditional quatrain for open forms and a freer line, her poems grow more self-assured while retaining their lyricism. Recent poems, for example, explore family kinships: "I am the half that lived deep down. / My body is taking me there, but I will come / down with a difference. At sixty-nine, / I am in a place my mother has never been." Randall's most engaging poems capture the pleasure of isolated moments, especially as they feed the imagination of, say, a painter like Monet: "Bearded to match his willows, he sits here / by his pond. . . . Let the world be done. / In the quiet of the lilies, never won / since Eden rose and the archangel fell, / that battle with the light goes on and on."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080711782X
• ISBN 13: 9780807117828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224