The Door Open to the Fire (Cleveland State University Poetry Series: LV) (Csu Poetry Series Vol. Lv) (Csu Poetry Series Vol. Lv) - Softcover

Judith Vollmer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880834413 ISBN 13: 9781880834411

Publisher: Cleveland State Univ Poetry Center, 1998

Synopsis

"Vollmer is a city poet -- and her city is Pittsburgh, blue collar, homely, well loved -- who nonetheless lies under bushes and looks to see the colors of flowers in the dark. She is a poet of righteous rages and bad moods, hilarity and tender griefs. She can be rough or elegant. . . . She has done for the city of Pittsburgh what William Carlos Williams sought to do for Paterson, what O'Hara did for New York, and Baudelaire for Paris." --Liz Rosenberg

About this title

About the Author

The Door Open the the Fire won the 1997 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. Judith Vollmer won the Brittingham Prize for her first book of poems, Level Green, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1991. She directs the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Poems and reviews by Judith Vollmer have appeared in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Witness, West Branch, The Women's Review of Books, Laurel Review, and elsewhere.

From Kirkus Reviews

Chatty and free-flowing, Vollmers best poems are generous celebrations of Pittsburgh and her ethnic family; the winner of Wisconsins Brittingham Prize for her first book, Level Green (1991), Vollmer teaches college writing and incorporates her experiences in a number of overly loose poems, in which she quotes her students, who also complain about her poetic models, including James Wright, the subject of a long homage for his portraits of hobos. Given to political rants, she recalls teaching in a barbaric high school during the Reagan years, when she had eaten Reagan/like a dot/of blotter acid, whatever that means. Vollmer frankly details her sexual history as well, remembering a long-ago abortion (Passing the Clinic in a Small Town) and then, in What She Didnt Tell Him, recalling the joyful relief afterward. A walker in the city, the poet sees the poor and the workers, but shes also capable of more subtle observation: We Built This City inventories its multitudes; Night Walks recommends a nocturnal journey (with mythic echoes) as an antidote to insomnia; and her one fully realized poem, The Approach, matches its claustrophobic couplets to her experience stuck in a traffic jam underground, with the promise of light ahead. With the tribal/ethnic force of Forche or Broumas, Vollmer sings herself and her city. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cleveland State Univ Poetry Center
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1880834413
• ISBN 13: 9781880834411
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80