The Acquiescent Villa: Poems (Poetry) - Hardcover

Buck, Paula Closson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807123048 ISBN 13: 9780807123041

Publisher: LSU Press, 1998

Synopsis

In The Acquiescent Villa, Paula Closson Buck writes the way Picasso paints―with slanted angles of approach and departure that give us the human heart passionately at work. A restless explorer of the world as body, the body as world, she is acutely aware of the ways in which language creates and sustains these spheres, bringing them sometimes into collision, sometimes into balance. Her poems are journeys into marriage and memory via ship or the body’s furious train―to Spain, to Germany, to the Turkish baths, to the corner store for bread.

In making such journeys, Buck yokes the intimate and the social so deftly that one hardly realizes what she has done. So while the speaker of “The Turkish Baths” thinks of becoming “again personal, like anyone afraid a dream will come to nothing,” the connection to history and to place that she longs for is already there, in the making and the language. In images as sumptuous as they are surprising, in voyages navigated by sensual touch and oblique eye, the poet gives us the far world brought near.

Buck’s methods of articulation vary: at times, a glancing blow; at times, an image so precisely rendered we penetrate layers of the psyche swiftly. Her intentions are perhaps most explicit in the seven-part sequence “Discourse on Monogamy and Flight,” a lyrical conversation between domestic love and a lingering discontent that leads the speaker out and away, to uncharted territories. The sequence resolves in lines beginning, “Here is the liturgy of a barbarous calm,” lines that compose a moment in which the speaker comes to rest in a particular place―a “here”―yet feels alive to the world in a way that is sacramentally powerful.

With elegant diction, an acute sense of the line, an honest and compelling struggle to know, to feel, to balance conflicting desires, this premiere collection offers compelling and mature work.

About this title

About the Author:

Paula Closson Buck is associate professor of writing and director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. Her poems have appeared in such periodicals as Shenandoah and Antioch Review.

Review:

The Acquiescent Villa
After Childbirth
Awake
The Balcony (after Manet)
Berlin Correlative
A Betrayal Of Integers
Chandeliers From An Old Regime
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 1. Levels Of Flight
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 2. Disequilibrium
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 3. Earhart
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 4. Equilibrium
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 5. For A Bat Hung Upside Down In Day
Discourse On Monogamy And Flight; 6. Holiday For One
Elegy
The Epithalamion Of Piero Ridolfi
The Errand
From A Porthole
Geburtstag / Birthday
Husband In The Trees
Little Spanish Poems: 1
Little Spanish Poems: 2
Little Spanish Poems: 3
Little Spanish Poems: 4
The Man At Pensione Marta Looks At His Eye
My Mother's Garden
Off Season
Pornography
The Road To Chateauneuf
Room With Open Blinds
Star Chart Over The Bed
Thin Woman At The Opera
The Turkish Baths
Via Del Amore
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0807123048
• ISBN 13: 9780807123041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64