Memory of Manaus - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881466301 ISBN 13: 9780881466300

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Catharine Savage Brosman's singular and authoritative voice, familiar to poetry readers in the South since the late 1960s, is heard again as she brings to scenes and topics, both new and familiar, her broad range of craftsmanship and styles, using, as one critic wrote, "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." Her poetic practice shows how closely the art of verse can, and must, be connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems here. The book features travel poems from four continents, rhymed lyrics on small or expansive topics, narratives in blank verse (concerning El Cid, Swift, Dickens, Charles Dodgson, Saint-Exupéry, and two women writers), five translations from Baudelaire (among the least-known poems), and satires concerning painting and publishing. Recurring themes include "great age" and death, friendship, piano playing, flowers and gardens, and the desert. Whatever the setting and topic--exotic cities, a Rocky Mountain cabin, Breton dolmens, dinner by the water, a nasty fall, a flowering vine--readers will recognize their truth, feeling both little flickers of sensation and the deep currents of love and suffering. The collection closes with a series of eight rhymed poems inspired by illuminations from THE HOURS OF CATHERINE OF CLEVES, presenting saints and martyrs, with their iconographic paraphernalia. Retrospectively, this final series sheds on the preceding poems its thematic lighting, combining tones of sorrow, sacrifice, charity, and joy. The ensemble creates what David R. Slavitt identified in an earlier volume by Brosman as "the morality of vision."

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 is well known in the Republic of Letters in America as an essayist, a scholar, and, foremost, a poet. Her work has been published and praised widely here and in France and England.

Review

"Wonderfully cosmopolitan poems by a poet who seems to have gone everywhere and noticed everything. And read everything, too. Exotic locales in Manaus, Oman, and Kochi--by way of Paris and London--are balanced by imaginative settings in Niagara Falls, Taos, and Cripple Creek. A sensitive, nuanced Baedeker for the mind." --Jared Carter, Poet

"Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Catharine Brosman's new book is its unflagging inventiveness of both idea and form. After so many poems published, this volume still is full of unexpected delights. This poet's metrical flexibility, power of observation, and resources of imagination never disappoint." --R.V. Young, Professor Emeritus of English, North Carolina State University and former Editor, Modern Age

"A MEMORY OF MANAUS exhibits technical mastery and offers a defense of traditional literary theory and humanistic thought. It contains several illuminating translations of Baudelaire and ends with an ekphrastic sequence of eight short pieces on different saints composed in classically sculptured stanzas and rhymed verse. Typical of Brosman's poetry, we find a highly developed sense of place with brilliant evocations of nature (rivers, deserts, plants, fruits, animals, ancient stones). We wander with the poet as she forages through back roads and inlets in the bayous of Louisiana, in several different paysages in France, all laden with memories, to the heart of Amazonia, as the title suggests. As always, Brosman travels with her literary companions--Mallarmé, Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Sartre, Swift, Dickens--who appear intermittently. Here, however, it is Albert Camus whose presence silently makes itself felt throughout the volume. We experience the poet's "sense of exile" as she savors our earthly kingdom with her husband, Pat. The fates are everywhere present, "reweaving patterns on their loom," as these two traveling lovers in their eighties ("preserved together by some prescient star") move from place to place. We sense Brosman's constant fear that Pat will take yet another crippling fall. Stiff and weary, they make their way where "Life dangles by a thread." To do so, the poet becomes like one of her personages, "a skilled funambulist," leading her husband precariously "along the Old Age River trail."

--Patrick Henry, Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0881466301
• ISBN 13: 9780881466300
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90