Reluctant Gravities - Softcover

Waldrop, Rosmarie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214281 ISBN 13: 9780811214285

Publisher: New Directions, 1999

Synopsis

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues", Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time", says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent, ' but frame the synaptic space between them". Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text". But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging", "Depression", "Desire", and even "The Millennium".

Author of over 15 books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabes and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, Rosmarie Waldrop keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.

About this title

About the Author:

Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Germany and has lived in the United States since 1958. The author and translator of dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, she is the co-founder and co- publisher of Burning Deck Press. Waldrop’s many honors include being named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, fellowships from the NEA, the Fund for Poetry, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Review:

"This influential avant-garde doyenne ... handily manages the paradox of the lucid enigma ... She maintains a distinctly American voice -- quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete ... a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles" -- Voice Literary Supplement

Reluctant Gravities provokes us to re-imagine loss and possession, what is is--parents, youth, memory -- we lose as we age, and what it is -- language, gender, desire -- that possesses us. -- Forrest Gander, The Providence Sunday Journal, 2 January 2000

Conversation 10: On Separation
Conversation 11: On Depth
Conversation 12: On Hieroglyphs
Conversation 13: On Ways Of The Body
Conversation 14: On Blindman's Buff
Conversation 15: On Sharing
Conversation 16: On Change
Conversation 17: On Lift
Conversation 18: On Depression
Conversation 19: On Childhood
Conversation 1: On The Horizontal
Conversation 20: On Pattern
Conversation 21: On Slowing
Conversation 22: On Aging
Conversation 23: On Cause
Conversation 24: On The Millennium
Conversation 2: On The Vertical
Conversation 3: On Vertigo
Conversation 4: On Place
Conversation 5: On Eden
Conversation 6: On Desire
Conversation 7: On Thirds
Conversation 8: On Betweens
Conversation 9: On Varieties Of Oblivion
Meditation On Certainty
Meditation On Fact
Song 1
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Defying the gravity of their print on the page with a peculiar buoyancy, the poems seem to breathe... -- American Book Review, Krysia Jopek, September/October 2000

The voice(s) that govern the text unstintingly refuse conclusion... -- Boston Review, Ann Humphreys, October/November 2000

This influential avant-garde doyenne, whose translations of Edmond Jabs were seminal events in postwar American poetry handily manages [in Another Language: Selected Poems] the paradox of the lucid enigma....She maintains a distinctly American voice--quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete...a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles. -- "Our 25 Favorite Books of 1997," The Village Voice Literary Supplement

Waldrop...demonstrates how vital the prose poem can be in the hands of someone who fully understands it. -- Harvard Review), William Doreski, Spring 2000

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0811214281
• ISBN 13: 9780811214285
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96