The Center for Cold Weather - Hardcover

Mathis, Cleopatra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0935296840 ISBN 13: 9780935296846

Publisher: Sheep Meadow, 1989

Synopsis

Book by Mathis, Cleopatra

About this title

About the Author

CLEOPATRA MATHIS's other books include Aerial View of Louisiana, The Bottom Land, and Guardian, all published by The Sheep Meadow Press. She is Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

Mathis's ( The Bottom Land ) impressive third collection abounds with broadly outlined images: she writes of "the dead ones," "a blind man" and "the senile one," continually shifting and modifying the identity of the "you" who is addressed. These spectral presences, however, become tangible in poetry that intertwines human deaths with death in nature. "The land won't keep / this flood," Mathis observes in "Dancer Among the Constellations"; in "The Competition," arranging dried flowers prompts the speaker to ask, "What are the ghosts to my elaborate baskets?" Death comes to comprise the passing of people, the end of a marriage, the mortality of insects, the loss of innocence of a child who "saw the cat yanked from mouth to mouth, / broken and torn" by dogs. Only two characters emerge relatively intact from this welter of decline, in "The Starling Is a Beautiful Bird": a man (no longer alive) and a woman (being born) who strike a memorable balance between death and life.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sheep Meadow
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0935296840
• ISBN 13: 9780935296846
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 89