The Anchorage: Poems - Softcover

Wunderlich, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558492003 ISBN 13: 9781558492004

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this debut collection, Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul—but it is a body in peril, one set in motion through the landscape of desire. In poems located in New York's summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod's open shoreline, the lover speaks to the beloved in the form of lyrical missives, arguments, and intimate monologues. The poems converse with each other; images repeat and echo in an effect that is strange and beautiful. Uniting the collection is an original and consistent voice—one that has found a hard won stance against the haphazard and negotiates with what is needful and sufficient. The Anchorage is a collection of love poems for the end of the millennium and takes as its subjects the dichotomies of love and illness, the urban and the rural, homosexual desire and familial tension. Wunderlich faces the complexities of contemporary life through poems that are both tender and striving and that leave the reader with an image of the body as a door through which one can transcend the suffering of the world.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Wunderlich is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Winner of the 1997 Writers at Work Poetry Fellowship, he is also the recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

From the Back Cover

"The last time I was so struck as I am now reading Mark Wunderlich's new collection of poems, I was gazing at an immense Greek vase, on whose elegantly fired red and black surface were warriors, at once flaunting and shielding their nakedness, struggling with their fates, or crushed by them in eerily erotic attitudes. The Anchorage bravely takes up the raw mess of desire and pain, the cold ache of longing and loss, and in sleek and searing poems exposes the way we live now to the larger powers of the racing heart and the radiant imagination. This is a scary, sad, ecstatic, astonishing book-and a brilliant debut." (J. D. McClatchy)

"In Mark Wunderlich's lexicon, the body is the anchorage for the soul; it's the place where the soul hooks itself to the only thing that keeps us here, alive. The title poem of this wonderful book begins with an image of a twelfth-century postulant sealed-as a child-in a wall. For nearly a decade her only passageway to the outside world was a small aperture through which she received food and communion.

"The anchor here is many things: Wunderlich's steady and unblinking, wide Midwestern range of memory, now cut by two coasts, imagined, scaffolded, real, held fast, American. The anchor is the body: its rootedness and strength, its injury and vulnerabilities. These are poems provocative and passionate, and muscular in their rigor and form. 'Rapture, sweet release,...something equally consummate and strange.' This is a wondrous first book." (Lucie Brock-Broido)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1558492003
• ISBN 13: 9781558492004
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72