The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry) - Softcover

Bang, Mary Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082032292X ISBN 13: 9780820322926

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2001

Synopsis

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world.

Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places―inside and outside the human psyche.

About this title

About the Author

MARY JO BANG is also the author of Apology for Want, winner of the Bakeless Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Louise in Love, winner of the Poetry Society's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She has received a Discovery/the Nation Award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082032292X
• ISBN 13: 9780820322926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80