Selected Poems (First Edition)

Selected Poems is compiled from the best works in Jean Garrigue's eight published collections. It also includes some uncollected poems drawn from the archive of her manuscripts in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
From its beginning, Garrigue's poetry reveals a remarkable richness and originality of imagery combined with an emotional intensity approaching transcendence. Human love in all its dimensions is a continuing preoccupation of her work, yet her feeling for the natural world, and especially for animals, runs equally deep. Her later work moves outward to wider perspectives on travel, politics, art, and literature itself, while exploring the philosophical questions of permanence and change, the role of the artist in an indifferent world, and the struggle of the spirit with the fact of death. Garrigue's lyrical vein broadens into a long, meditative lyric, often fused with a richly detailed evocation of place, that recalls some of the greatest poems of her Romantic predecessors.

An Indiana native whose first publication came in 1941, Garrigue developed a poetic style that came to be known for its pulsating rhythms and romantic, symbolist motifs. The poems here were selected from her eight previously published collections. "The Circle," from her first collection, shows her eye for detail and her skill at conveying the lushness of nature: "The wood, swollen with mushrooms,/ Those rotting like excrement." As her poetry matured, her range grew to include the erotic: "The lover mirroring by his joy/ That flush beauty brings." In her prose poems, Garrigue's mellifluous voice carries the long lines, rippling along with a rich musicality. Selections from her highly praised Studies for an Actress and Other Poems ( LJ 2/1/73) include "The Grand Canyon," which some critics consider her finest poem, and range thematically from the autobiographical to a concern with pollution and the environment. Throughout, Garrigue's sureness of craft, firm voice, and wildness of imagination is evident, a testament to her poetic achievement. For most collections.
- Francis Poole, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark
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