Ivory Cradle (APR Honickman 1st Book Award) - Softcover

Macari, Anne Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966339568 ISBN 13: 9780966339567

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2000

Synopsis

Ivory Cradle is the winner of the third annual American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize, as chosen by poet Robert Creeley. In his introduction, Creeley writes, "now and again one comes upon a story so quietly and articulately told that it stays in mind long after, echoing, recasting the usual frames of reference and order, making whatever it is the world had been thought to be, quite changed and even, again, unknown." Ivory Cradle is such a story as it charts a personal journey through questions of faith and history, with its anger redeemed by passion and the transformative power of art.

from "Morning in Florence"

I was out the door and halfway to the elevator
When he threatened to throw
my clothes into the lobby. With the baby to think of
I had to know when to stay or go

So I headed out alone into the consoling brown light
Off the river, feeling the child
Swimming carefully inside me as I walked to see
Fra Angelico's frescoes in cells

Where monks once slept and knelt, contemplated
And vanished; where in rapture he worked
fast as the plaster dried to get light to wash the wall
the way God would have done it

"Ivory Cradle announces a poet fully formed, fully mature, and wild to say things in ways they've never been said before. Rarely, very rarely, is a so-sane heart so beautifully articulated. This is not just an exceptional first book, it is a flat-out exceptional book, period." ―Thomas Lux

"Reading Anne Marie Macari's poems I think of Jane Kenyon, in her kindred humor, quietness, fierceness, and plain integrity. But this poet is 'flowering dark.'"―Jean Valentine

Anne Marie Macari lives in Mt. Kisco, New York.

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: 0966339568
• ISBN 13: 9780966339567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96