Collected Poems of Marie Ponsot
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Marie Ponsot’s Collected Poems is the stunning lifework of the prizewinning poet, gathered in one volume: the world she has made of life’s fire for sixty years. The present celebratory volume covers nearly all of her published work, from True Minds (1956), which was number five in the famous City Lights Pocket Poets series, through the 2009 Easy, her most recent collection; it also includes some new work, written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot’s gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the “hand-span skill” that is the poem. In examining the powerful life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound. “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral,” she advises us. “Bury the loss.” (And adds: “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.”) Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot’s sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we’ve never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience “language as the primitive dialect of our human race,” as she has described it—to gradually enter a state that is “what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ponsot (Easy) sees her signature mixture of delight and devastation traced beautifully in this comprehensive volume. With a poet who can take many years between publishing books, it's satisfying to finally see the arc of her long career alongside new poems. Readers can follow her evolution as the self-serious and formal work of her City Lights debut, True Minds, evolves through sparser variations on the sonnet to the ambitious, sprawling work of her second and most famous collection, Admit Impediment, which came out 25 years later in 1981. It is a treat to observe Ponsot's mischievousness throughout, especially when that trait knocks against the morose, as in "Sois Sage O Ma Douleur," in which she writes, "I say/ I am too old, tired, crazy, cold to/ say nothing of ashamed / to try." Ponsot is a master of the delayed revelation, delighting in play and surprise that only becomes more sharply timed as her career progresses. The book concludes with a small collection of her new work, spirited as ever, as when she writes, "Ninety is old, I/ keep telling myself, so behave! And I'm older, 94. It is the look of happy." Longtime fans and new readers alike will find enchantment, wit, and wisdom in this collection, which cements her reputation as a major American poet.
