A Protocol for Touch (Volume 7) (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Merritt, Constance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574410830 ISBN 13: 9781574410839

Publisher: University of North Texas Press, 1999

Synopsis

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose ‘the tyranny of names’ with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its ‘protocols of touch’—tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion’s contradictory occasions. Merritt’s prosodic range is prodigious—she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart’s insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."—Eleanor Wilner

Between us, how we wrestle over words
Strain to wring some blessing from the silence,
Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,
The tyranny of names: night day,
Sable and alabaster, flint shale,
Steel and lace. Who among us can afford
To speak the language—any language—rightly?
As if it weren’t enough to bear one heart
Eternally divided in its chambers?
We stand close enough to touch. We do
Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,
A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, Constance Merritt holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations and an Academy of American Poets College Prize, she has published poems in Callaloo, Quarterly West, American Literary Review, Disability Rag & Resource, and The Women’s Review of Books among others. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, while pursuing studies at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina.

Reviews

Merritt's debut collection, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, opens like a flower in time-lapse photography--each curving line a slow, eloquent disclosure. The music of her words, their melody, harmony, and rhythm, is complex and involving. The beauty of her imagery, which gives equal weight to the senses of touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight, is both as new and as familiar as dawn. And her unexpected leaps of thought, feeling, and faith are exhilarating. Merritt expertly parses loneliness and memories of torqued family alignments and elusive love, but she also writes resonant and rebellious responses to scripture and other forms of authority. An African American, Merritt is also blind, and questions of color and hierarchy come into play often in her poems, which are powered by the tension between classical forms and unconventional points of view. Merritt explores many states of being, both external and internal, and gives voice to personae both timeless and contemporary in poetry that combines the strength of steel and the suppleness of silk. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: University of North Texas Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574410830
• ISBN 13: 9781574410839
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 86