Oz

by Nancy Eimers

Overview

A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offer a paradoxical, moving elegy of things we left—or that left us—behind, not just the toys that grow obsolete, but a lost cat, a name, a monarch wing, a melting glacier, all the children at Terezín—an "immensity" that "recedes so incrementally we can't— / we just can't / put a human face on it." Eimers looks closely at what we lose and how we let go of it, sorrowfully or with secret relief, or some irresoluble hope of recovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887485329
Publisher:	Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2011
Series:	Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

NANCY EIMERS is the author of A Grammar to Waking (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), No Moon, winner of the 1997 Verna Emery Prize (Purdue University Press), and Destroying Angel (Wesleyan/University Press of New England, 1991). She has been the recipient of a Nation "Discovery" Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships and a Whiting Writer's Award. She is on the Creative Writing faculty at Western Michigan University and has taught in the Vermont College MFA Program since 1995.

Table of Contents

Grassland • Oz • Future Parking Lot • Infant Sight, or Thirty-four Lines Set Adrift • Long Gone Conversation about Cancer • Derby Winner Clings to Chances for Recovery • Trapped Miners 'May Not Be Found' • Couplets: On a Mowed Lawn • September Rain • Pelicans, in a Time of War • Crawl Key Wind • Glacier All the Toys Are Vanishing • The Cold War Special: Tin Litho Dollhouse with Bomb Shelter, 1962 • Flicker • How We Thought about Toys • Letter from Mrs. Graham Greene to Her Husband 62 Years after the Blitz • El Rancho: '50s Subdivision, Phoenix, Arizona • Bird Nests over the Gates to Terezin • The Pinwheel in Our Neighbors' Flowerbed The Small Hours • Confession of a Luddite • Scalp • Book of Invisible Things • Julie's Mouth • Y at the End of It • Fifth of July • My Parents Contemplate Moving a Last Time • Address to a Stack of My Journals • Lost Continent • Afterlives • On Not Talking Politics with My Sister • White-throated Sparrow • To a Friend Whose Mother May Be Dying • You Are Hereby Notified • Reading the Ice Notes

What People are Saying About This

Nance Van Winckel

In Eimers’ Oz, the squared-off rooms of prose press against the open-roofed, wall-less abodes of poems. Dollhouses, bomb shelters, Cornell’s boxes—Eimers is fascinated by those fascinated with such “contraption[s] of inner space.” Space managed and manageable. But around such contraptions, one feels the larger uncontainable world lurking, leering. From encapsulated space, a self sees out and gathers strength to step out. This dance between estrangement and communion—it’s part of how we survive; it’s the jittery way, these poems beautifully suggest, we move toward compassion. --(Nance Van Winckel)

David Rivard

There is as true a feeling of consolation delivered by this book as any I have read in recent years. Nancy Eimers makes a mirror out of our tears, and then turns that mirror at an angle so that we can see what lies hidden from our sight. Her poems answer Basho’s great question, one of the essential questions of all lyric poetry: “my neighbor—how does he live, I wonder?” This is that rare book whose compassion is as deep as its craft. --(David Rivard)