Profane Halo - Softcover

Conoley, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0974635324 ISBN 13: 9780974635323

Publisher: Wave Books, 2005

Synopsis

Conscious of politics and of music, these poems continue Conoley’s explorations into the questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. This collection takes its title from Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning.

Gillian Conoley’s collections include Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, Tall Stranger (nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Some Gangster Pain and the chapbooks Woman Speaking Inside Film Noir and Fatherless Afternoon. Winner of several Pushcart Prizes, the Jerome J. Shestack Award in Poetry and included in Best American Poetry, she is poet-in-residence and professor at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.

About this title

About the Author

Gillian Conoley's collections include Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, Tall Stranger (nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Some Gangster Pain. Winner of several Pushcart Prizes, the Jerome J. Shestack Award in Poetry, and included in Best American Poetry, she is Poet-in-Residence and Professor at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.

Reviews

Exuberant and challenging, the quick cuts and vibrant, freestanding images in Conoley's fifth volume let her see America from many sides and in all sorts of scales, from the ground level of coastal suburbs to the grand cycles of political history. "Dear Sunset that was sun of now/ Near Greatness, dear tongue my Queen dear rock solid," the title poem asks, "how could we know that we are forerunners?" There follows a series of verbally brilliant, sometimes strikingly fragmentary poems, some perhaps inspired by photographs; Conoley lights up American spaces and persons past and present, embedding quotes from poetic luminaries (Dickinson, Zukofsky) and showing a slant toward the Pacific coast, where "California floats its prisons in the sea." Conoley (Beckon), who teaches at Sonoma State, also runs the hip poetry journal Volt; if her last book took much (perhaps too much) from Jorie Graham, this one recalls such peers as Brenda Hillman and Claudia Keelan. Though sometimes scattered, even chaotic, Conoley's odes and dithyrambs convey remarkable emotion, from joy ("ecstatic the sparrows/ in bursts in trees/ above the Western American fence") to whimsy to disorienting pain ("Night wounds, let me introduce you/ to the day wounds"). This is a strong mid-career book with plenty to recommend itself in terms of condensed macropolitics and felt regionalism. But coming so soon after superficially similar volumes from Keelan (The Devotion Field) and Eleni Sikelianos (The California Poem), Conoley's project may not get the oxygen it needs. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0974635324
• ISBN 13: 9780974635323
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72