Breakwater - Softcover

Brosman, Catharine Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881461636 ISBN 13: 9780881461633

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Breakwater, Catharine Savage Brosman's new collection, presents a wide variety of lyrics, narrative poems, and meditations in free verse, blank verse, rhymed quatrains, and other forms.

About this title

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Lightning striking twice motivates this large, large-spirited new collection by one of the most elegant contemporary American poets. Brosman married early and definitely for love. It didn’t last, mostly because both spouses were young and inexperienced. In 2007, after 40-plus years of no contact, an unassuming e-mail query brought them together again. Their love still lived, and they have remarried since. In the title poem, she walks with him, contemplating an island downstream from where pilings combine two bayous’ flows. “Having passed the breakwater,” she says, “we’ve landed / on this island of our age.” In the poems of the succeeding first part of the book, she brings their reunited love to her beloved southwestern Colorado, to revival of old memories, and to the concerns of her vocation as a teacher-scholar of French literature. In the second part come recollections of loved ones, musings on figures who keep her literary life vital (e.g., Gide, Mina Loy), and translations of a French Renaissance poetess anticipatory of the English metaphysical poets; the third consists of observations on historic places, churches, birds and butterflies, and mountain camping with friends. He is with her in most of the latter poems, too, though as a presence more than an actor, for altogether these precisely crafted, richly musical pieces demonstrate how a life can come to a fine, beautiful, and intelligent point, indeed. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0881461636
• ISBN 13: 9780881461633
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 111