On the Old Plaza - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881464961 ISBN 13: 9780881464962

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind. A prefatory poem, To Readers, uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry.; Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.

About this title

About the Author

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

Review

Catharine Savage Brosman knows what she is about: "the aim of verbal art / is beauty, sorcery seducing mind and heart." On the Old Plaza is a seductive collection in many ways. It celebrates mature contentment in lyrics like "A Late Summer Idyll," but it also recounts with charm and liveliness an adventure in "A Voyager's Journal." This poet has added another bright honor to her grand career. --Fred Chappell, author and poet

I have found these poems of Catharine Savage Brosman a constant source of pleasure. Wit, humor, satire, and surprising tenderness are part of these delights, but so, too, is the story of a late romance and the drama and beauty of landscapes. As to be expected in poems written from the advantage of wisdom and age, there are funerals, farewells, and gravestones, but it is the radiance of life--all life--that prevails in this exquisite collection. --Constance Rowell Mastores, author of A Deep But Dazzling Darkness

With a felicity, lucidity, and formal grace unmatched in contemporary poetry, Catharine Savage Brosman's poems endow me with guidance and joy. Her new collection, On the Old Plaza, foregoes the "old suspicions of unease" for the "language of substantial" illuminations and "currents of surprise." Articulate, extraordinarily focused, intensely wise, these poems reveal a fecund mind attuned to the highest music--a poetry clear, complex, and timeless. --William Wright, founding editor of Town Creek Poetry and series editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0881464961
• ISBN 13: 9780881464962
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144