Ghosts! - Softcover

Bellen, Martine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933132418 ISBN 13: 9781933132419

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil, 2011

Synopsis

Contemporary poems on the ancient past have to be ghosts. They are dragged through the inscriptions of strangers until they become something ethereal and gray. And in that spectral light, as we know, colors become brighter as if shining from rain. This is how I read these poems and find them fresh. Fanny Howe Martine Bellen’s fabulous new collection Ghosts! is a mosaic fable of descent and return in which a postmodern Cinderella who “likes to fuck and fuck” seeks a door for which she is emotionally the right size. It is a book of loss, in which lovers and fathers turn to ghosts and join with the winds, and also of redemption and recovery. The imagination fiercely demands to “re-member” what has been torn to pieces. Like the poet H.D., to whom she pays tribute in the beautiful first poem, Bellen displays purity, even gnosticism, of thought. The doors of passage swing both ways, into history (outward) and myth (inward), while retaining the texture of experience. Here are “transparencies before candles in a darkened room,” a negotiation of light and darkness at the very axis of consciousness. The Biblical story of Lot’s wife shows how emotionally fatal it is to gaze back at one’s disasters. The doors ahead are all open, if we will only take the courage to pass through them, charged not with regret but desire. Paul Hoover

About this title

About the Author:

Martine Bellen is the author of the novella 2X(SQUARED) (BlazeVOX Books, 2010) and seven collections of poetry, including GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press, 2001); FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE MONKEY GOD (Spuyten Duyvil); TALES OF MURASAKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and PLACES PEOPLE DARE NOT ENTER (Potes & Poets Press, 1991). A bilingual collection of her poetry has been published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Juergen Balmes). She has written the libretto for Ovidiana, an opera based on Ovid's Metamorphoses (composer, Matthew Greenbaum) that has been performed in New York City and Philadelphia. She has collaborated with David Rosenboom on Ah! Opera No-Opera, a pioneering collective work, that's been co-composed and performed by creators from around the globe. Its world premiere was in September 2009 at Redcat in Los Angeles. She was a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy, as well as an American Academy of Poets Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1933132418
• ISBN 13: 9781933132419
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 82