On the North Slope - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 088146273X ISBN 13: 9780881462739

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2012

Synopsis

On the North Slope, Catharine Savage Brosman's ninth collection of poetry, displays once more the impressive range of her artistry and her powerful poetic vision. Divided into four parts, the volume includes free verse, blank verse, and rhymed quatrains. Taken together, the poems impart the very feeling of consciousness and illuminate both its potentialities and its burdens as it relates to the world. After the introductory poem, the first part, A Commonwealth of Place, features the winds, snow, light, and sunset of a Colorado winter. Following poems combine elements of personal and historical experience with mountain and desert scenes, which illustrate the subtle bonds between such experiences and their natural and cultural settings. Order Under the Sun comprises eighteen lyrics, mostly rhymed, dealing with flowers, birds, trees, and one of Brosman's specialties foodstuffs, including carrots, honey, and garlic. The tone of these lyrics, which focus on the human meaning of such natural objects, ranges from humorous to grave. The Scripted Fate brings together narrative and lyric poems treating the poet s girlhood, in addition to such topics as failure and unhappiness, dying, and friendship and love, ending with an affirmation of married happiness. The final part, Themes for the Muses, features creative artists Rodin, Donizetti, Liszt, and Yeats, among others and performers. The poems emphasize creative work but even more the often dramatic dimensions of artists lives and the implications of artistic vision. Readers of Brosman's new collection will find a generous spectrum of responses to experience, both light and dark, in poems of great verbal and visual appeal.

About this title

About the Author

Catharine Savage Brosman, who lives in Houston, is emerita professor of French at Tulane University (New Orleans) and Honorary Research Professor at the University of Sheffield (England). She currently serves as poetry editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. She is the author of eight previous works of poetry and is the author or editor of numerous books on French literature.

Review

Brosman continues to shower us with a personal poetry so expansive in spirit and intellect that it makes the personal poetry called confessional seem like so much trivial self-indulgence. For her, the world, life, and the mind are vast. When in this book s first part, A Commonwealth of Place, she writes of her homeland, the Southwest, color and heat stretch the poems into landscapes worthy of Bierstadt or O Keeffe. In Order under the Sun, concerned with flowers, birds, trees, and odd one in cheese, her gift for precise observation repeatedly refines words into fine-grained photographs, even lyrical cinema. Turning to time and death in The Scripted Fate, she sees from an elder s perspective the shapeliness of
whole lives and, in five elegiac sonnets, in particular, the sometime fitness of a life s end. In the final section, Themes for the Muses, she extends her passion for the appreciated life to those of dancers, poets, composers, and artists, great and homely. She writes in four particular forms sonnet, rhymed
quatrain, and two lengths, six- and eight-line, of blank-verse paragraphs with unforced elegance,
achieved in no small part through complete mastery of those humble poet s tools, enjambment and punctuation. --Ray Olson, Booklist, April 15, 2012

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 088146273X
• ISBN 13: 9780881462739
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 129