Perpetua - Softcover

Broumas, Olga

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556590253 ISBN 13: 9781556590252

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 1989

Synopsis

A collection of poems, including The Massacre, No Harm Shall Come, Touched, Evensong, and Amberose Triste.

About this title

Review:

After
After Lunch
After The Little Mariner
Amberose Triste
Attitude
Before The Elegy
Between Two Seas
The Bird
Chaste
The Crowning
Days Of Argument And Blossom
Decolletage
Detail
Devotee
The Distance
Eros
Etymology
Eve To God's Back
Evensong
The Eye
Eye Of Heart
Field
Floridian
For Every Heart
Interval
The Knife
Lumens: After Yes
Lumens: Bridge
Lumens: Each Love
Lumens: Teacup
Lying In
The Massacre
The Masseuse (2)
Mercy
Mitosis
The Moon Of Mind Against The Wooden Louver
Native
Next To The Cafe Chaos
Night And Light
Nirvana Stair
No Harm Shall Come
Oh Lord
On Earth
Parity
The Peaceful Fist
The Pealing
Perisprit
Perpetua
Privacy
The Prohibition
The Return
Selfish
The Separation
She Loves
Speech
Stars In Your Name
Tattoo
Three For The Cusp Of May
To Draw The Warmth Of Flesh From Subtle Graphite
Touched
Tryst
The Veil
Walk On The Water
The Way A Child Might Believe
With God
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

From Publishers Weekly:

In her fourth collection, Broumas (Yale Younger Poets Award-winner Beginning with O) passionately invokes the redemptive forces of Eros to heal a world darkened by disease and oppression. In unabashedly erotic poems, her credo emerges: "The text / of sex, word for word and by heart / divined, enacted / in the antechamber of the soul so kindly / also provided me, is my guide and prayer." The poet's Greek homeland lends mythic themes and shapely, light-filled images, as in "On Earth," where she tells of the ritual exhumation of her father's bones with dignity, and in an evocative chapter entitled "Lumens," touched by Sapphic utterances: "I come from small seas littered with / Playful islands." More often, however, Broumas's poetic execution falls short of her conceptions. Too many poems are marred by a bewildering amalgam of images, awkward tropes or metaphors that drift toward the nonsensical: "Like a pit in the fruit's ripe stomach, / encircled by airborne toxins clouding its permeable skin, / I am nourished, gratefully, / by the force of an unconditional / habit still linking life to the pulp of fruit."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 1556590253
• ISBN 13: 9781556590252
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96