Ivory Cradle - Hardcover

Macari, Anne Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0966339541 ISBN 13: 9780966339543

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2000

Synopsis

A personal journey through faith and history, wherein anger is redeemed through passion and art.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Selected by Robert Creeley, this year's APR first book-award winner is an expertly crafted collection of reflective, chiaroscuro verse. Macari casts themes of family history, failed love and pregnancy and child-rearing with a darkness that haunts many of the poems while remaining deliberately unfocused, as in "My Son and I See the Arms and Armor Exhibit": "I don't want to cross to a world where the sky/ is wet and cold and a knight rides from the woods/ just as thaw is reversing. I don't want to pity his body." The book is divided into two parts, with many of the stronger poems belonging to the St. Francis-based latter section, where Macari's poems steel to face a deeper sense of loss: "That's how you rise now from your chair,/ rise to your grief, your shining eyes on me,/ your hand pressing mine so I'm stunned by what I'm losing,/ what I've lost, stunned by how we go on..." While able to impeccably, as well as unironically, work with highly charged imagery, Macari has a tendency to disguise the sincerity that is at the core of her poetry with a kind of awestruck tonal elevation that too often trivializes the subject at hand: "who would not focus on what tore/ like hailstones at the roof,/ who would not admit it was all/ unfathomable. " but which works for the more purely descriptive passages. This quiet, familiar book won't get a lot of attention, but Macari's poise and instinctive sense of a poem's shape betoken precise and measured follow-ups. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

Airport Hotel
All Afternoon
American Music
Augustine
The Beekeeper's Sorrow
Between Heaven And Earth
Bohemia
Clare And Francis
Clare Views The Body Of Francis
Dialogue: 14th Century
Eight Birds
For That Moment
Fourth Of July
Geraniums
Glory
Hunger Garden
I Can Be Bread
In The Parking Lot
Ivory Cradle
The Jesus Of Cracow
Leaving Settefrati
Mexico
Morning In Florence, San Marco
My Brother With Shark
My Son And I See The Arms And Armor Exhibit
Needle And Thread
On The Hill
On The River
One Life
Packing
Palm Sunday, Mexico
Parable
Que Sera
Reading About The Earthquakes In Assisi
The Room
Saints, Marriage, Desire
The Same Dream
She Died
Slope Of Stone And Dirt
This Is How You Start
Tiny Saviors
Vermont Trees
The Woods Behind The House
Yankees
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0966339541
• ISBN 13: 9780966339543
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96