Rising Venus: Poems - Softcover

Cherry, Kelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080712768X ISBN 13: 9780807127681

Publisher: LSU Press, 2002

Synopsis

With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women’s experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet’s remarkable range and skill.

The book’s journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Beginning with “Adult Ed. 101: Basic Home Repair for Single Women,” Cherry asserts, “Ladies, you are about to find out / just how much really rough / weather / your house can take.” Probing the emotional extremes of woman’s life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like “Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward” open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. That fearless art inhabits the role of “An Other Woman” and then explores the status of woman as aesthetic object, whether of the male gaze, cultural perception, or her own observation: “she sees the long-haired girl she used to be, / in boots and mini-dress, apart and watchful / as in a redoubt, in a room in a painting in / a room, or as if in a poem turned inside out” (“The Model Looks at Her Portrait: A Retrospective”).

A passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in “Sunrise,” “A sky as blue as if it were / The backdrop for a Renaissance / View of the Ascension” becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn, “a morning / Risen from the night.” The title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman’s hard- earned rise into her own sense of self: “Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny.”

About this title

About the Author

Kelly Cherry is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Death and Transfiguration and God’s Loud Hand, as well as novels, story collections, an autobiography, and a book of essays. She lives in Virginia.

Reviews

Though the likeable, troubling poems in her sixth collection demonstrate a considerable emotional range, Cherry is at her best and most memorable here when she writes about sex, loss and madness. "I want your needle stitching my wound. I want you to lick the end of my thread," she writes in "Needle and Thread." And though she's often associated with formalists like Henry Taylor, she's independent in her decision to balance a strong need to rhyme with a taste for irregular (and nuanced) meter. As with her last outing, 1999's Death and Transfiguration (also from LSU), there are occasional miscues: a section of poems inspired by artworks doesn't overcome literary deadweight; a powerful sequence about being left by a married lover hiccups on its references: "And this is as it was to be, Beethoven Knew that." As with most Southern gothics, what's most awkward also turns out to be most effective: "God knows how many sessions With the doctor, his unclean breath hot on My neck, haven't brought back The time I lost when the bottom of the grocery sack That is my mind fell out." And the gothic's cousin, the family romance ("Becoming My Mother," "The Final Visit with Her Brother"), requires from Cherry a plainspoken reserve that she hits perfectly, making this venus, on the whole, anything but retrograde. (Apr.) Forecast: Cherry made the cover of Poets & Writers a while back, and career-wise is ready for her national close-up. This book's emotional investment, technical savvy and self-deprecating wit would be a hit with women's book clubs that liked Mary Karr's memoirs or Kim Addonizio's tough-talking life-and-love verse narratives. While often regionalist in scope, LSU has the distribution in place for it to happen.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080712768X
• ISBN 13: 9780807127681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80