A Table of Content: Poems - Softcover

Tanning, Dorothea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974023 ISBN 13: 9781555974022

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2004

Synopsis

The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning

Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,

"Fill me."
-from "End of the Day on Second"

Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.

About this title

About the Author

Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) lived an extraordinary life as an artist and writer. She published two books of poetry, A Table of Content and Coming to That; two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World; and a novel, Chasm. In 2012, she died at the age of 101 at her home in New York City.

Reviews

This internationally known painter and sculptor's debut collection is a curious mix of numerous styles: confessionalism, Whitmanic declaration, a self-containment worthy of Merrill. The stance that speaks loudest is a straightforward, unmannered approach to the deconstruction of icons, references and symbols: "He told us, with the years, you will come/ to love the world./ And we sat there with our souls in our laps,/ and comforted them." Elsewhere, Tanning's methods draw on Surrealism; that is no surprise, given her lifelong dialogue with the movement in her painting and her marriage to Max Ernst. (A poem dedicated to M.E. refers to Ernst's La Femme 100 Tetes.) Her speaker's tone throughout is tinged with regret—at loss of opportunity, vitality, love—making the poems quieter at heart than some of their jagged surfaces first suggest. At moments of greatest directness, Tanning can dip into cliché, as when noting that "In French death is feminine," or that Merce Cunningham's dancers make "5 barely believable/ bodies/ become/ 1 thought." But more often than not in this marvelous miscellany, she pulls it off; "Time Flew" describes the whole arc of affection in a moment of eye contact: "What they saw/ would have no end, both knew."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974023
• ISBN 13: 9781555974022
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72