Passages: Poems - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807120502 ISBN 13: 9780807120507

Publisher: LSU Press, 1996

Synopsis

In Passages, Catharine Savage Brosman presents journeys between the world and spirit, journeys that share an axis of yearning for a realm as pure as desire. Brosman refracts through metrical virtuosity, historical imagination, and a vision like cleansing light a world alive with coruscating color and sensual textures.

Each line is subtle, quiet, yet breathtaking in its precision, and the spare eloquence of Brosman’s perfectly executed gestures invests with stunning pathos poems such as “Wind”―which reflects a woman abandoned by husband, children, and faith itself―and “Carnival,” in which a lonely aging woman at Mardi Gras muses.

Whether rendering a speaker’s spiritual communion with Mozart, the febrile longings of a woman caught in adultery in French Algeria, or a love letter by Madame d’Epinay (deftly couched in the metrics and tropes of eighteenth-century France), Brosman moves effortlessly from the broodingly intimate perspectives of other eyes, other souls, to the most abstract of aesthetic meditations.

These are poems of wit and passion, poems that beg to be read and reread, and this remarkable collection reminds us again and again of the passages that open into the lives of our imagination.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In Passages Catharine Brosman presents journeys between the world and spirit, journeys that share an axis of yearning for a realm as pure as desire.

About the Author:

Catharine Savage Brosman, who now lives in Houston, is professor emerita of French at Tulane University. She is the author of numerous books of French literary history and criticism, two volumes of nonfiction prose, and seven collections of poetry, including most recently Range of Light and Breakwater.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0807120502
• ISBN 13: 9780807120507
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64