Civilian Histories: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.) - Softcover

Upton, Lee

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9780820321851: Civilian Histories: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820321850 ISBN 13: 9780820321851

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2000

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In Civilian Histories, her fourth book of poetry, Lee Upton portrays contemporary culture as the many-eyed, monstrous argus, and explores the common gestures between people and among cultures that constitute “foreign relations.” Formally ambitious, ranging from short, allusive lyrics to long, intricately patterned sequences, Upton’s poems reflect on complicity in and vulnerability to violence. Her poems also explore moments of hard-won triumph for the vivid, provocative people who inhabit them.

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About the Author:

LEE UPTON is the author of three additional books of poetry: Approximate Darling (Georgia), The Invention of Kindness, and No Mercy, a past winner of the National Poetry Series Competition. Upton has also written three books of literary criticism, most recently The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, and Mastery in Five American Poets. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.

From Publishers Weekly:

The most prominent historical figure in these Civilian Histories is Mary Rowlandson, whose story of Indian captivity--coupled with the pleasures of food--inaugurates the American obsession with the boundaries between domestic intimacy and public knowledge. While the terrain of intimate behavior her is often familiar, its texture is not; a dissociation infiltrates all of Upton's rituals, to the point where the book begins in the midst of disappointment: "And eyes not lulled as I wanted them to be." (Upton is the author of The Muse of Abandonment, a study of Russell Edson, Louise Gl?ck, James Tate, Jean Valentine and Charles Wright.) In "Garden Solstice," for instance, "In the glint of needle light,/ of grass seeds, dew flecks,/ a friend is throwing her voice/ while far inside our grainy heaven/ a butcher's apron/ ripples its dried blood in the wind." The book is in fact stuffed with food and flavor: oysters, sugar, berries, eggs, basil, spearmint. But far from offering up a neo-magical-realist feast, Upton, whose No Mercy (1989) was chosen for the National Poetry Series, uses oral imagery to enrich the odd appetizers of language she serves with cautious passion: "Sins get weepier, phlegmier, looser./ He's the trunk of the family tree// and each topmost branch,/ each living shade above him/ bears its fruits." The 70-odd page-length lyrics and five slightly longer serial poems in this seventh collection branch out with a heat of intimacy that is sensual, remarkable and pointed. (Apr.)
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