Indeed I Was Pleased With the World - Softcover

Ruefle, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887484670 ISBN 13: 9780887484674

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Poets of astonishing vision are rare. Mary Ruefle is of their number. Her poems discover the full beauty and anguish of life that most of us dare not see, much less depict in luminous detail for the ages.

About this title

About the Author

MARY RUEFLE is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently A Little White Shadow (Wave Books 2006). Her poems and prose appear in many anthologies , including Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems, and The Next American Essay. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College, and lives in southern Vermont.

Reviews

The title of Ruefle's 10th collection of poetry is evocative of a divine pronouncement upon creation, yet the statement's past tense suggests an ominous future awaits. It is this beginning and end, in all its myriad tellings, that Ruefle interrogates, crafting parables/poems, remaking the world and reckoning with a coming apocalypse. The poems are unsparing in their indictments: only a human being could hammer another one/ to a board, she remarks in Gathered on a Friday in the Hour of Jupiter as a crowd assembles on a bright day, surrounded by sunflowers, to watch an execution. In Speak, Zero, she sharply observes: From finches we take feathers for our hats/ From us they take hair for their nests, suggesting the vast divide between humanity and nature, between the necessary and the frivolous. These poems grapple with despair and cruelty in a voice that is devotional, obsessive and quirky, as if the right words might offer a spell for salvation. As she writes in Quick Note About the Think Source, Fortunately for us,/ the world is not that complicated:/ eventually, words like torpor and muddle/ came into being, and then torpid, muddled/ accounts of the universe took over the populace. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887484670
• ISBN 13: 9780887484674
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80