Red Studio (Volume 20) - Softcover

Cornish, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932440312 ISBN 13: 9780932440310

Publisher: Oberlin College Press, 2007

Synopsis

Winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize, Red Studio is a collection of startling lyricism, vivid sensuality, and keen precision. Its opening poem, "Restoration," explores the devastation of the art treasures of Florence in the 1966 flood, and the delicate, painstaking process by which they are nursed back to life. Throughout the book, the poet focuses attention on artifacts of experience--reliquaries, remnants, remains--as they embody traces of memory and link us to antiquity. The past is never simply the past, Cornish suggests, and art is never valuable simply for its own sake. Rather, experiencing a work of art whether ancient or modern, both immersed in time and paradoxically beyond it, suggests how we might begin to come to terms with grief and loss. "There's an arc / between the living and the dead, as when / a crow rises from a field, sun on its back," Cornish says in one poem. Over and over, this poet gets it right, tells us about life and art and their interdependence, in poems that are fierce, funny, and filled with a love of the world that acknowledges candidly how precarious it is or rather, how brief our time in it must be.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Cornish teaches at Fairhaven College of Western Washington University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, and the anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, selected by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Red Studio is her first book of poetry.

Review:

"Because Mary Cornish owns a keen, loving eye and a susceptible heart, her poems can braid together sight and feeling so as to produce a delicacy rarely found in contemporary poetry. She takes us by the hand and leads us into rooms of wonder." (Billy Collins)

"As the painters once used the broken yolks of eggs, the rocks, and the earth itself to make their colors, so Mary Cornish has made these miraculous poems: so intelligently wrought the page disappears, so gorgeous I stand and stare. At the core of each is human life, fiercely known and loved and endured. These are the poems of a radiantly alive adult woman." (Marie Howe)

About this edition

• Publisher: Oberlin College Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0932440312
• ISBN 13: 9780932440310
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 78