Forbidden Words: Poems (Volume 1) - Softcover

Traxler, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826209351 ISBN 13: 9780826209351

Publisher: University of Missouri, 1994

Synopsis

In these strong and captivating poems, Patricia Traxler examines the overt and hidden forces of language, from ordinary speech to liturgy, including the power and weight of the unspoken. In particular, Traxler explores the relationship of women to language - how they may absorb power from it or use it as a refuge, how muteness can be a language in itself, how language and silence operate within a family, in a love relationship, or even in the larger world of politics and global concerns.
Many of the poems also enact the interplay of spirit and landscape, or deal with faith, doubt, or loss of faith. Longer poems such as "The Driver," "The Lunatics' Ball," "Confession," and "The Widow's Words" incorporate the voices of different female speakers to form a unified, passionate whole.
Forbidden Words, Patricia Traxler's third book of poetry, is a welcome addition to this remarkable poet's already distinctive body of work.

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Traxler, a native of San Diego, currently lives in Salina, Kansas. The author of two previous poetry collections, Blood Calendar and The Glass Woman, Traxler is the recipient of several awards, including the 1991 Writer's Voice Award for Fiction, and a Bunting Poetry Fellowship.

From Publishers Weekly

The bitterness of loss flows through Traxler's ( The Glass Women ) third collection like a powerful astringent. Having lost her faith in love, the poet hones her rage into scalpel-sharpness, probing and excising a lifetime of hurt. The first lesson in disappointment was learned at the knee of an immigrant grandmother for whom "the way to pain / Was joy, and ever after that the way / to pay for joy was pain." The writer's dramatic sense and the controlled elegance of her language ironically counterpose the poetry's intense emotional substratum. In "High Wire" she constructs a metaphor for the adrenalin-fraught anxiety of falling in love: "And now I find myself here, balanced / on groundless terrain, sucked ever outward on the wire, / past return . . . I only learn / I'm falling when I've fallen and time has stopped / like a failed heart." "Confession" is a riveting monologue exposing the web of dependency that has ensnared a battered wife in a cycle of denial and abuse: "I never told anyone, even my mother, / what he'd done because that would have given / my worst secret away: my life was a lie / and I was the liar; only a liar would stay." These poems strike a thrilling balance between personal disclosure and the rigors of writing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0826209351
• ISBN 13: 9780826209351
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64