Selected Poems - Hardcover

Ruefle, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 193351745X ISBN 13: 9781933517452

Publisher: Wave Books, 2010

Synopsis

Poetry. A career-defining retrospective by a much-beloved contemporary master, SELECTED POEMS gathers together the finest work from her distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most brilliant, expert and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining, need look no further than this monolithic retrospective.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Ruefle has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (THE MOST OF IT, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book (Go Home and Go to Bed, Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A LITTLE WHITE SHADOW (Wave Books, 2006). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

Reviews

This first retrospective collection from Ruefle, which selects from her nine previous books of poetry, the earliest of which first appeared in 1982, shows her to be a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor. This book also reveals Ruefle to be in the habit of writing one kind of poem--first person, usually set in unbroken columns about half a page long; it's a good kind of poem, but can become tiresome in large doses. Most remarkable, especially in the early poems, is the quiet, straightforward clarity of her voice, something deceptively hard to achieve: "One wants simply, said the lady,/ to sit on the bank and throw stones/ while another wishes he were standing/ in the Victoria and Albert Museum," reads "The Intended," which moves along with a characteristic kind of wisdom. More recent poems, such as those from her acclaimed collection Tristimania, turn either toward a kind of surrealism or exaggerated reality for its power: "I failed to put the cap back on the glue./ But it has been a beautiful day." While Ruefle has long been a favorite poet among poets, her books have mostly appeared with small university presses, making them hard to find; this accessible selection should bring them to a wider audience. (Sept.) (c)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193351745X
• ISBN 13: 9781933517452
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168