The Lonely-Wilds

Elizabeth Breese

• Verlag: The Kent State University Press
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010286
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Poetry

"Traveling from her pastoral America to Neruda's Chile and the Ireland of St. Kevin, Elizabeth Breese sings the lonely-wild lyric of ditch flowers and raw honey, tornados and radios, broken birds and sailors lost at sea. Her ars poetica: 'little bee hand in pocket editions, the rough-/ cut paper combs, dancing for the things it loves.'"-Harryette Mullen"As with Dickinson and Stevens, to understand an Elizabeth Breese poem is beside the point; one apprehends it, the way one does a scent or strain of music. Roving, impure, funny, brainy, and passionate, hers is work I want to keep beside me for the good company and generous pleasures it offers line by gorgeous line."-Kathy Fagan

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Ars poetica

Grenora, N.D.

Calamity the way I think it

Northern pastoral

Chile

A prayer with a hydrangea in it

Supernature

Amen

Subsidy

Fontanel

Beverly & Doris, 1990

Murray River

Her portrait by Alan Lomax

Cenotaph

Inis Óirr

Self-portrait at Glendalough

Note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the editors of the following journals where some of these poems first appeared:

Barrow Street: “Subsidy”

FIELD: “Grenora, N.D.,” “Supernature,” “Calamity the way I think it” and “Self-portrait at Glendalough”

Sou’wester: “Amen”

I am grateful for the Vorman Scholarship Fund from the Department of English at The Ohio State University, which made the research for several of these poems possible.

For their help and wisdom, I would like to thank Kathy Fagan, Andrew Hudgins, Angie Estes, and Henri Cole. Thank you to my dear friends at The Ohio State University for their tremendous support and kindness. Claire and Annie, you’ve been true blue.

To my parents, thank you for encouraging me always.

ARS POETICA

The best & worst things happen here,
but everyone loves the idea of honey. So here
is my little bee hand in pocket editions, the rough-
cut paper combs, dancing for the things it loves.

The worst things are voices, wrong
somehow & sour. If it is not elderly enough to totally
crack its hips in my closed hand, I think of the long
limping walk toward disaster.

The voice of the sensual, if it does not crack
someone’s hips, will be put to bed
without a kiss. It must fight the urge to turn
over & ask what it did wrong until it falls asleep.

The worst things are all true; I have been the girl
whose bones are the hull of a ship called
lost at sea many time...