The Muscled Truce: Poems - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807128902 ISBN 13: 9780807128909

Publisher: LSU Press, 2003

Synopsis

In her fifth full-length collection, poet Catharine Savage Brosman gracefully employs a wide array of forms and styles to address the ontological question―the problem of being, including the “momentary flame” of human life―and the complexity of relationships with others and with oneself.

The first section, “A Distant Shore,” introduces characters chronologically from King Minos to D. H. Lawrence―mythological, historical, or anonymous travelers of one kind or another―who are given voice through Brosman’s craft in seamless transitions among free verse, blank verse, and rhyme. In the second part, “The Muscled Truce,” twelve short poems in rhymed iambic tetrameter describe activities, from beekeeping and gardening to skating and winegrowing, as ways of encountering the world, acting on it, and meeting its demands. The book closes with “A Cosmic Comedy,” in which works about contemporary, often mundane situations reinforce earlier metaphysical concerns of nature, religion, aging, and death.

At turns witty and weighty, personal and universal, The Muscled Truce bears Brosman’s indelible emotional imprint and reveals her amazing technical flexibility, continuing her tradition of writing “poetry that might legitimately be assigned a vintage” (Baton Rouge Advocate).

About this title

About the Author

Catharine Savage Brosman’s creative works include four previous poetry volumes, most recently Places in Mind, and two books of essays. A native of Colorado and longtime resident of New Orleans, she is a professor emerita of French at Tulane University.

From Booklist

Brosman's new collection of exceptionally well crafted formal verse contains dramatic monologues, genre portraits, and personal reflections. The monologues' speakers span the ages from ancient Crete, where King Minos surveys his career, remarking first that "awful nuisance" the Minotaur, in whom he apprehends catastrophe for his realm, to present-day New Mexico, where Brosman herself is "strangely moved, / given I do not like him much," by the D. H. Lawrence Memorial. The genre portraits--to steal a term from painting that indicates common rather than noble subjects--present, in quatrains, pursuers of avocations, including "The Beekeeper," "The Golfer," and "The Pianist," as each pits physical effort against the natural world to reach the accommodation Brosman calls "The Muscled Truce." The reflective poems, based on events experienced traveling abroad and at home, altogether pose the conception of life as "A Cosmic Comedy," a drama that, though painful and peculiar, ends happily. This is a Christian attitude, and Brosman is surely one of the best contemporary poets writing in English from a Christian perspective. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0807128902
• ISBN 13: 9780807128909
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72