A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Tichy, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819521531 ISBN 13: 9780819521538

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Synopsis

Book by Tichy, Susan

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The great grandniece of a soldier who was part of the occupying U.S. army in command of the Tarlac Province of the Phillipines at the turn of the century, Tichy ( The Hands in Exile ) translates the specific circumstances of Filipinos during the Insurrection and its aftermath into universally accessible verse. With chilling clarity, she depicts a people of courage and restraint. Sensitively but never sentimentally, she tells their stories of then and now, and her own while visiting Tarlac in 1985. The poems, which often include dialogue and resemble prose, are relentlessly direct: many of the voices speak to the second person, while the narrator, the "I," questions, criticizes and reveals with the innocence and persistence of a child. Tichy weaves the rich, colorful fabric of her subjects' lives honestly and humbly, with respect and wonder. She structures her lines so that the sadness of a thought comes quietly at the end, like a sigh, the crystalline images powerful and lingering: "Even the baby is still, watching the plastic gunship / fish air behind the heads / of three seated, solemn men. /Two girls in love with the same boy /giggle in the crisscross shade. But not one person / claps hands, taps a foot, or sways / although it is permitted, now, to dance."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The Arrest Of Dante: Our Chains
At A Place Of Ambush
At P.c. Sergeant's House
Barabgay Fiesta: A Captain
The Bus From Sagada: Passing A Sacred Mountain
Capas
Five: 1876
Four
Galang
Here
In Fact
Liquidation Is A Metaphor, Sels.
Looking For A Death March Marker
Mabuhay Npa
One
Photograph, Agta Bowman
Prelude: 1956
Seven
Six
Three
Two
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0819521531
• ISBN 13: 9780819521538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 77