Long Like a River - Hardcover

Schoenberger, Nancy J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814781055 ISBN 13: 9780814781050

Publisher: NYU Press, 1998

Synopsis

Many rivers run through Nancy Schoenberger's third collection of poems, Long Like a River. From the Clark Fork ("its full house of trout the dream of a summer noon"), to the Mississippi ("long as its Indian name"), to the Amazon and Napo Rivers, these poems explore the poet's Deep South roots, plumbing memory and desire and paying homage along the way to Theodore Roethke and George Seferis.

About this title

About the Author:

Among other honors, Nancy Schoenberger has been awarded an NEA and two state artist grants. Her volume, Girl on a White Porch, won the 1987 Devins Award for Poetry. She teaches creative and nonfiction writing at William & Mary in Virginia and edits the transatlantic poetry journal Verse. With her husband Sam Kashner, she coauthored A Talent for Genius, the Life and Times of Oscar Levant (which inspired an episode of A & E's "Biography") and Hollywood Kryptonite, The Bulldog, The Lady, and the Death of Superman.

From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-8147-8104-7 Schoenbergers second volume, winner of this years NYU Press Award for Poetry, derives much of its narrative power and emotional force from her love of rivers. Despite a rough start in some confessional poems, this William and Mary professor (and coauthor of two entertainment biographies) gains in gracefulness as she escapes the confines of self, especially in the wonderful, four-act drama of Four for Theodore Roethke, which reenacts the Fall and fully lives up to her masters equally dense-textured verse. Somewhat sentimental in poems about her domestic experiences and protests during the Vietnam War, the poet elsewhere acts squeamish over some fresh venison killed by menfolk. Recipe, though, nicely counters this animal pacifism with a detailed description of catching and dressing a terrapin for stew. Schoenberger further elegizes nature in poems capturing the lazy decay in Louisiana and the persistence of both wild flora and the slow-moving river. The presence of the past and the menace in still things reveal themselves in poems describing works of art about women. A hodge-podge of disparate subjects fills out a volume that should have been slimmed down to its best lyrics. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0814781055
• ISBN 13: 9780814781050
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 100