No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822958759 ISBN 13: 9780822958758

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Synopsis

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's \u0022Imagine\u0022 to wrestle with the world as it is: \u0022no hell below us, / above us only sky.\u0022
It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.
Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to \u0022Try to praise the mutilated world,\u0022 as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

About this title

About the Author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including, most recently, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011; and The Book of Seventy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors. Ostriker teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

From the Back Cover

"As attentive to injustice as it is to the varieties of the sensual life, No Heaven is evidence of a deep engagement with what it means and feels like to be a person of high consciousness in the early twenty-first century. This is a lover's book; that is, a book by someone who loves people enough to show all their sides, and the world enough to be furious with it. It gives us Ostriker at her most capacious."--Stephen Dunn

"No Heaven is Ostriker at her best. The elegiac poems that sing to her dead mother and characterize an eroding America as 'this moon-shaped blankness' are deeply compelling."--Maxine Kumin

"In No Heaven Alicia Ostriker is at the top of her form. The poems 'hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap'--no need of heaven when the living can perform such feats."--Diane Middlebrook

Reviews

A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting and Jewish identity. If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page. Clean, unambiguous lines (reminiscent of Robert Pinsky's) present her speaker as an explainer, a bringer of news: "Sometimes I feel like a mailman who faithfully visits each door in his district,/ Sometimes like a mermaid out of water." Ambivalent poems about New York, Jerusalem and Berlin praise "days when to walk a city/ is like feeling completely healed." A group of poems responds to major works of Eastern and Western painting and classical music, like Botticelli's, Mozart's and Bonnard's "mysteries of domestic/ Life in the modern void." Ostriker has achieved recent prominence with nonfiction devoted to Jewish experience, and she ends with an emphasis there; a final set of ambitious longer poems juxtaposes a history of suffering, recent events in Israel, the Iraq war and the travails of the poet's mother. "Where did she go, my hopeful young mother/ My mother who promised we would overcome/ The bosses and bigots?" Ostriker concludes: "I want her// To come back and try again." (Apr.)
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In her newest collection of clarion poems intimate and worldly, Ostriker writes about her life as a wife, mother, and grandmother with tenderness, but she is also edgy, erotic, funny, and ornery. She misses cigarettes, darn it, and reminds us that "too much goodness is bad." She revels in the density of cities even as she suggests that New York should offer tourists maps of crime scenes, including the street where John Lennon was killed (her title is taken from a Lennon lyric: "Imagine there's no heaven"). She writes of her mother's death, and of war, keenly aware that writing about loss has always been the lot of poets. But this valiant, wry, and nimble poet does not resist the lure of beauty as she translates into shimmering language the wild choreography of sex, and basketball players moving in sync like a flock of barn swallows. Ostriker's tonic poems remind us that although we are the animal that kills out of rage and greed, we are also creatures of grace and harmony. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822958759
• ISBN 13: 9780822958758
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144