Custody of the Eyes (Carnegie Mellon Poetry) - Softcover

Burwick, Kimberly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887486177 ISBN 13: 9780887486173

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017

Synopsis

These tightly wound lyrics examine the dark history of a dictatorship through the lens of motherhood while invoking the pastoral as a metaphor for loss, and the overwhelming human will to survive what has scarified us. By exposing the named and nameless stolen babies of Franco’s long regime, Burwick is able to tap into personal and universal fears of rearing children in the face of violence, forgery, and absolutism.

About this title

Review

“These intense lyric poems weave the love of a mother for her young son with the horror of the stolen babies of Franco’s Spain. Burwick’s unflinching eye walks us through landscapes of greed and brutality.” (Anne Marie Macari)

“If ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,’ as Rilke would have us believe, then I must think terror is also the advent of beauty, please, God, let it be so. Kimberly Burwick’s collection, a meditation for the 300,000 stolen infants under Franco’s program, prays this prayer with each delicate, wrenching line that reaches toward these erased souls even as the poet also reaches for the impossible birth of her own son. Custody of the Eyes is not a book of poems; it is a beating heart, bloody in its brave work to face our greatest terror, the beginning of that which makes us each beautifully human.” (Rebecca Gayle Howell)

“Kimberly Burwick’s collection Custody of the Eyes focuses beyond a shameful enterprise toward a meditative landscape of compressed insights. Each terse lyric expands into a glossary of measured emotions where nature is a character that emerges and delivers a life-force inherent in the spirit of the poems, and perhaps these realizations are curative. And yet, as the collection evolves, we nod our heads to the final truth: “Because I saw your birth, I am responsible for all the dead.” The encounter with death is monolithic. Burwick’s poems speak to the present and future by acknowledging the past through intriguing images, and unexpected phrases invite us in.” (Yusef Komunyakaa)

Edition details

• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887486177
• ISBN 13: 9780887486173
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64