Springing: New and Selected Poems

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Springing: New and Selected Poems (Reprint) Pub. Date: 10/21/2003 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Springing: New and Selected Poems Pub. Date: 3/12/2002 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

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Overview

From the award-winning author of The Bird Catcher, this life-spanning volume offers the delight of both discovery and re-discovery, as Ponsot tends the unruly garden of her mind with her customary care and passion. The book opens with a group of new poems, including “What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?”—a question that has kept Ponsot’s work vital for more than five decades. Throughout the selections from her four earlier books and a trove of previously unpublished work covering the years 1946 to 1971, she offers us a “lost haven in a springing world.” Sometimes sharp in her self-perception, but always listing toward pleasure and elegance, unafraid of grief and the passage of time, Ponsot continually refreshes her language and the spirited self from which it emerges.

From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

"If leaf-trash chokes the stream bed, reach for rock-bottom as you rake the muck out," writes Ponsot in one of the 26 new poems of this collection, and the lines might well serve as its wry motto. Springing takes readers on a tour of a quirky, start-stop career, presenting, along with the new work, nine poems from True Minds (1956), 22 from Admit Impediment (1981), 26 from The Green Dark (1988), 19 from The Bird Catcher (which won the 1998 NBCC Award) and 26 other previously uncollected poems from 1948 to 1971. The 25-year pause in book publication would seem to reflect a period of domestic life, documented in the uncollected work ("watching you strike worldly poses flirting excited with someone's arch French wife") and ending in "For a Divorce," which opens the Admit Impediment section: "Asked why we ever married, I smile and mention the arbitrary fierce glance of the working artist that blazed sometimes in your face but can't picture it." Ponsot's poems are built around just such unflinching observations of intimate interactions and misfires, whether of familial relations ventriloquized through updated Greek dramatis personae, a French woman's accommodation of her mother's married lover or the self's castings about the natural world, "space recast as flatness, long diminishings of blue borne lightly." If the new and uncollected work doesn't have the focus of the trio of books beginning in the '80s, this selection evinces the larger-scale, muckraking pursuit of artifice's underside that Ponsot's speaker so wonderfully produces poem by poem, "smaller and more human than belief." As she writes in "Gliding": "I envision the next leap, the next thousand years of practice, the eventual skill become like independent flight, habitual." Readers will look forward to those practice sessions. (Mar. 19) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Even when they appear simple, Ponsot's poems can be difficult; they require both an attentive mind and a sharp ear. Her language is daring and playful, a challenge and a delight: "What would it be to be water, one body of water/ (what water is is another mystery)." In more than 50 years of writing, few subjects seem to have eluded Ponsot's attention. Here are poems of fable and history, of social and intellectual concern, but the strongest work by far is the personal: "What women wander?/ Not many. All. A few./ Most would, now & then,/ & no wonder./ Some, and I'm one,/ Wander sitting still." Ponsot's poetry is elegiac without shadowy regret. This is the thoughtful, and sometimes unsettling, work of one of the more powerful poets of this tempestuous generation, and the current collection is a chance to chart her fascinating evolution. Ponsot won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her previous collection, The Bird Catcher (1998). Her latest would be a strong addition to any contemporary poetry collection. Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375709876
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/21/2003
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 233
Sales rank: 629,430
Product dimensions: 5.93 (w) x 8.35 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Marie Ponsot’s first book of poems was True Minds (1956); later books are Admit Impediment (1981) and The Green Dark (1988). She is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching at Queens College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, New York University, and Columbia University. Among her awards are an NEA Creative Writing grant, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. Ponsot’s most recent collection, The Bird Catcher, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1998.

From the Hardcover edition.

Read an Excerpt

Springing

In a skiff on a sunrisen lake we are watchers.

Swimming aimlessly is luxury, just as walking Loudly up a shallow stream is.

As we lean over the deep well, we whisper.

Friends at hearths are drawn to the one warm air;
stranger meet on beaches drawn to the one wet sea.

What wd it be to be water, one body of water
(what water is is another mystery). (We are water divided.) It wd be a self without walls,
with surface tension, specific gravity, a local exchange between bedrock and cloud of falling and rising,
rising to fall, falling to rise.

Old Jokes Appreciate

Up the long stairs I run stumbling, expectant.
Impatience is hopelessly desperate. Hope takes time.

Sort out the private from the personal.
Advance on losses at a decent pace.

"Aside from all that, Mrs. Lincoln,
how did you like the play?"

Origin

The skull or shell or wall of bone shaped with its egg advantages does not advertise

the gardens it contains,
the marriages, the furies,
or the city it shelters
(clangs, clouds, silences,
found souls crowding,
big dank cans where things putrify)

or the glade it hides for us to hide in, where
—our lives eased open—
we drowse by the pond and wake beside ourselves with thirst,
where (dipping the cup we find)
we get of necessity a drink of some depth full of taste and original energy.

The darling face,
the fragrant chevelure,
even the beautiful ears on the shell do not boast about the workplace inside.

They prefer to appear to agree they are just along for the ride.

From the Hardcover edition.

	Old Jokes Appreciate	3
	Drunk & Disorderly, Big Hair	4
	Origin	6
	What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?	8
	Now Then	11
	Decorum, Reflection	12
	Ghosts of Narrative	13
	Metaphysics	16
	Quick It Can	18
	Rods & Cones, & The Statute of Limitations	20
	What Changes	22
	End of October	25
	Entranced	27
	Real Estate: Kripplebush, New York	29
	Crude Cabin, At the Brink of Quiet	30
	Out of Water	32
	Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad Science But	33
	Antepenultimate	35
	At the Botanical Gardens, University of British Columbia	36
	After-Image, Cortes Island	37
	My Word Is My Bond	39
	We Stand Our Ground	40
	Strong, Off Route 209	41
	Imagine That	42
	The First, At the Last	44
	Rain All Night, Paris	46
	A Visit	49
	Sensibility	50
	St.-Germain-des-Pres: Summer 1948	51
	Ritournelle, for Paris 1948	52
	Private and Profane	54
	Anniversary	56
	Pleasant Avenue	57
	"Ville Indigene": Afrique du Nord	60
	Sam Refuted, Respectfully	63
	Take Any Card	65
	Under a Routine Procedure	67
	Elegy for Elizabeth Bleecker Averell	68
	Gigue for Christmas Eve	69
	To Forbid Grief	70
	Because We Certainly Have Nothing Better to Do	71
	Survival	72
	Springing	73
	Dialogue of Nemo and Personne	74
	Explication de Texte	76
	The Crow Dressed in Peacock Feathers	78
	A Tale Told by Atheneus (Venus Callipygus)	79
	Symposium Holiday	80
	Last Resort	81
	"Luxuria," Dreamboat	82
	Half Full	83
	Out of the North: Two Views	84
	Take My Disproportionate Desire	89
	"Qu'ai-je a Faire en Paradis?"	90
	Matins & Lauds	91
	Possession	92
	Multipara Gravida 5	93
	Communion of Saints: The Poor Bastard Under the Bridge	94
	"'What Are You Doing Here, Stephen?'"	95
	Rockefeller the Center	96
	For a Divorce	99
	Basic Skills	103
	Residual Paralysis	104
	About My Birthday	106
	Bilingual	107
	Among Women	109
	From the Fountain at Vaucluse	110
	Ghost Writer	114
	The Differance: Chatou-Croissy	117
	Live Model	119
	Half-Life: Copies to All Concerned	121
	Unabashed	123
	As Is	124
	Late	125
	Of Certain Students	129
	For a Season	130
	Lullaby	131
	A Third Thank-You Letter	132
	Discovery	135
	Advice: Ad Haereditates (I)	137
	Gliding	141
	The Great Dead, Why Not, May Know	145
	On a Library of Congress Photo of Eunice B. Winkless, 1904	151
	The Problem of Freedom & Commitment	153
	The Problem of Fiction	154
	The Problem of Gratified Desire	156
	The Problem of Loving-kindness	157
	Wearing the Gaze of an Archaic Statue	158
	"Love Is Not Love"	160
	Hangzhou, Lake of the Poets	164
	Levels	166
	The Royal Gate	168
	Outside the Fertile Crescent	169
	Synthesis	170
	De-fusing the Usual Criminal Metaphors	171
	Jamaica Wildlife Center, Queens, New York	173
	The Ides of May	175
	Between	176
	Hard-Shell Clams	177
	Out of Eden	178
	Patient	179
	Museum out of Mind	180
	Call	183
	Friday Market	184
	Myopia Makes All Light Sources Radiant	185
	In Abeyance	187
	Analemmatic	189
	Take Time, Take Place	190
	"I've Been Around: It Gets Me Nowhere"	199
	Old Mama Saturday	201
	Northampton Style	203
	The Title's Last	204
	One Is One	205
	Pourriture Noble	206
	For My Old Self, At Notre-Dame	208
	The Border	210
	Separate, In the Swim	212
	The Story After the Story	214
	Roundstone Cove	216
	Reading a Large Serving Dish	217
	Analysis	219
	Two Questions	220
	Pre-Text	222
	Explores Cry Out Unheard	224
	Winter	225
	Oceans	226
	Even	227

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Springing: New and Selected Poems

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Overview

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