Song & Error: Poems

by Averill Curdy

Overview

A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice

A sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.
In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374534325
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Averill Curdy was born in the Pacific Northwest, where she worked as an arts administrator and in the software industry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others, and her poems have appeared widely in both the United States and England. She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

Editorial Reviews

Throughout this long-awaited debut, Curdy constructs a realistic surface of her inner life, whereby daily perceptions—mediated through her immersion in art and aesthetics, apocrypha, historical facts, classical literature, and Americana—merge into a careful sounding of human redemption and grace . . . Curdy's intellect is engaging enough that she never betrays her gift through ornamental pretension or prettified artifacts of language . . . Such witty and unsentimental observations get at the substance and nuance of the natural order, or simply what it truly means to feel the world around us.” —Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review

“Curdy is a poet in the highest order. Her musicality finds its counterparts in Auden, Donne, Hopkins, and Merrill, to whom she seems to have apprenticed her syntax and ear. But there is something else in her writing that is entirely her own, an almost excessive pleasure in texture and alliteration that has been unfashionable in poetry of late. Curdy's precisely conjured images and similes transform the mundane into the metaphysical.” —Maya Catherine Popa, The Rumpus

“Song & Error is a worthy debut collection that rewards multiple readings. It's a rich mixture of poems that revel in their language and ideas, their combination of real and imagined, of present day and history, that, while sometimes dense, sometimes obscure, sometimes confounding, nevertheless present enough striking images, precisely fashioned phrases and intriguing words to fully stock a wunderkammer of their own.” —Adam Ford, Bookslut

“This first book from Curdy gets elaborate fast without sacrificing passion . . . Curdy favors gorgeous language and complex syntax, sometimes abstract but more often descriptive . . . Her shorter poems, and almost all those set in the present, convince by their cascade of phrases and their wealth of detail, reminiscent of Amy Clampitt and Lucie Brock-Broido.” —Publishers Weekly

“Averill Curdy navigates a ‘route between suffering and song' in this splendid book of passages, this ardent collection of transformations, this adventurous work of time travel that moves so fluently between the past and the present, her own life and other lives. Song & Error is a long awaited, marvelous debut.” —Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

“I haven't read a first book as fresh and lively as Song & Error in a long time . . . Any reader who loves poetry would be a fool not to read this book. ” —William Logan, The New Criterion

“Ovid's famous error has come again to be poetry's great gain. Averill's Curdy's Song & Error is a triumph of sound, sense and nuance. Poems rarely sound as good as these while still imparting such sustainable wisdom. This is poetry that, in its lush overheard pleasures, bends both history and our sense of selves as though they were magnetic fields and poetry the Earth of its magnificent domain. ” —Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of The Ground

From the Publisher

Throughout this long-awaited debut, Curdy constructs a realistic surface of her inner life, whereby daily perceptions—mediated through her immersion in art and aesthetics, apocrypha, historical facts, classical literature and Americana—merge into a careful sounding of human redemption and grace. Although such richly textured poems might seem mere brocade, Curdy's intellect is engaging enough that she never betrays her gift through ornamental pretension or prettified artifacts of language.

The New York Times Book Review - Major Jackson

This first book from Curdy gets elaborate fast without sacrificing passion. Scenes from modern life outdoors and indoors—a “Sparrow Trapped in the Airport,” a dying salmon, a young beauty killed by a truck bomb—stand beside longer poems based on historical characters, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, and the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca. Curdy favors gorgeous language and complex syntax, sometimes abstract but more often descriptive. A lizard on a laptop represents “the digital evergreen of failing pulses”; a seabird in the Jamestown colony shows a “gray wick-threaded throat/ Burning the oil secreted, an amber musk/ Of uncompassed seas & the solitary hunt,/ Of error & sign.” Yet Curdy’s voices can get stark, even frightening: “My sister/ was safe when I was beautiful,” says one speaker from beyond the grave. Her historical figures can disappoint, sounding too fond of their own words. Her shorter poems, though, and almost all those set in the present, convince by their cascade of phrases, their wealth of detail, reminiscent of Amy Clampitt and Lucie Brock-Broido, whether in a “Single Room,” “reaching/ For something, for anything,” or on an urban roof, “With the linden’s melon scent twined/ Around an untuned engine’s blue carbon/ Monoxide and Wednesday’s trash.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly