Collected Poems (Re/View) - Softcover

Hull, Lynda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974570 ISBN 13: 9781555974572

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

Synopsis

The definitive collection of the poems of Lynda Hull, "perhaps the most intensely lyrical poet of her generation." (Mark Doty)


If each of us
contains, within, humankind's totality, each possibility
then I have been so fractured, so multiple & dazzling . . .
-from "The Window"

Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections-long unavailable-with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.

Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume-chosen by series editor Mark Doty-is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

About this title

About the Author:

LYNDA HULL (1954–94) was born in Newark, New Jersey. She was the author of Ghost Money, Star Ledger, and The Only World, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.

From The Washington Post:

Lynda Hull in her short life (1954-1994) wrote memorable poems, distinctive for their flamboyant shadows, a created world where pathos always has some swagger of the doomed: a quality that you might call (depending on your decade) Goth, punk, noir or maudit. In an afterword to a new Collected Poems by Hull, David Wojahn speaks of a "combination of elegance and danger, of lyric acuity and peril." In his introduction, Yusef Komunyakaa makes the comparison to "a desperate screech through a jazz musician's trumpet or sax." In a review quoted on the new book, Robert Polito says Hull's work suggests "a fantasy coupling of Elizabeth Bishop and Lou Reed."

Hull understood the way our idea of glamour can be informed by the music and manners of our parents' generation. The sounds, sights and paraphernalia of adult life exert an endless allure, the charm of sexuality before it can be quite apprehended:

THE CHARMED HOUR

for my mother

On the radio, gypsy jazz. Django Reinhardt
puts a slow fire to Ellington's Solitude
while ice cubes pop in your martini. The sting
of lime on my palm. By the sink you lean,
twisting your rings. Turn to the window.

In shadow you could be sixteen
again, in your mother's kitchen
above Cleveland, the cafes of Warsaw still
smoky in your mind with talk and cigarettes,
English still a raw mystery of verbs.

Windows brighten across the city at the hour
when voices steam from the street
like some sadness -- the charmed hour
when, smooth as brilliantine, Phil Verona
with his Magic Violin slides from the radio.

Ice-blue in silk, his All-Girl Orchestra sways
through the parlor. You let yourself
step with them, let a gardenia release
its vanilla scent in your hair.
Over terraces, you dance above vapor-lights,

Gold Coast streets where club doors swing
like the doors of banks that never fail.
In back rooms men and women spend themselves
over green baize tables, the ivory poker chips.
In their chests wings beat, steady

as the longing wakened to from every dream
of flying. We could shut the door
on this vertigo, but Mother when we
come to ourselves our feet skim the tiles.
Spoons shine on the table, and Mother,

we're dancing. I'm mouthing the words
to a song I never knew, singing when
evening arrives and flattens the sky
to a last yellow crease of light,
thin as a knife, as a wish.

Yearning of this kind, bathed in atmosphere, expresses an affection toward the past, as well as a distance from it, celebration as well as loss. Reaching back through the maze of generations, as far back as "the cafes of Warsaw," the poet takes as her guide the ephemeral thread of desire, suggested by details such as "ivory poker chips" and "Phil Verona with his Magic Violin." Hull blends the elegiac and the sensuous into a proxy nostalgia so stylized it becomes ironic. The memory of listening to this music with her mother, dancing to it, becomes a valued, even totemic memory of memory. The child is entranced by the music partly because it comes from the mother's life before the child was born. That imagined past, made of family stories and old music, movies and anecdotes becomes a vital focus for the poet's imagination. The poem, alert to its own straining for recall, becomes a poignant way of "mouthing the words/ of a song I never knew."

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1555974570
• ISBN 13: 9781555974572
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120