Too Bright to See and Alma

by Linda Gregg

Overview

Linda Gregg's first two books - Too Bright to See & Alma - are, at long last, available again-this time in a single volume. In this book, we witness the awakening of one of the finest American poets of her generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973575
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	11/01/2001
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	247,191
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Linda Gregg has received numerous awards for her poetry, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Atlantic Monthly.

Read an Excerpt

Too Bright to See & Alma

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By Linda Gregg

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2002 Linda Gregg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-357-4

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Chapter One

THE GIRL I CALL ALMA The girl I call Alma who is so white is good, isn't she? Even though she does not speak, you can tell by her distress that she is just like the beach and the sea, isn't she? And she is disappearing, isn't that good? And the white curtains, and the secret smile are just her way with the lies, aren't they? And that we are not alone, ever. And that everything is backwards otherwise. And that inside the no is the yes. Isn't it? Isn't it? And that she is the god who perishes: the food we eat, the body we fuck, the loose net we throw out that gathers her. Fish! Fish! White Sun! Tell me we are one and that it's the others who scare me, not you. AT THE SHORE Naked women are being dragged down the sandstone shelving on their backs, very slowly. With ropes tied to each foot separately so the legs close and spread open as they are moved. When they cry out or shout down at the men sitting in the lifeguard chairs looking at them through the gun sights, the sounds, no matter how angry or foul, curve and billow like a wave: coming to the men on a soft wind caressingly, like sirens singing. SUMMER IN A SMALL TOWN When the men leave me, they leave me in a beautiful place. It is always late summer. When I think of them now, I think of the place. And being happy alone afterwards. This time it's Clinton, New York. I swim in the public pool at six when the other people have gone home. The sky is grey, the air hot. I walk back across the mown lawn loving the smell and the houses so completely it leaves my heart empty. THE WOMAN ON HER KNEES AT THE RIVER She is washing clothes, her body moving forward and back in its two positions. Suppliant giving. She grinds corn with stone on stone the same way and makes the round flat bread. All this in a place filled with the weight of death. Life would stop in this poverty if she got into a boat that moved away by itself full of flowers. NO MORE MARRIAGES Well, there ain't going to be no more marriages. And no goddam honeymoons. Not if I can help it. Not that I don't like men, being in bed with them and all. It's the rest. And that's what happens, isn't it? All those people that get littler together. I want things to happen to me the proper size. The moon and the salmon and me and the fir trees, they're all the same size and they live together. I'm the worse part, but mean no harm. I might scare a deer, but I can walk and breathe as quiet as a person can learn. If I'm not like my grandmother's garden that smelled sweet all over and was warm as a river, I do go up the mountain to see the birds close and look at the moon just come visible, and lie down to look at it with my face open. Guilty or not, though, there won't be no post- cards made up of my life with Delphi on them. Not even if I have to eat alone all these years. They're never going to do that to me.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Too Bright to See & Alma by Linda Gregg Copyright © 2002 by Linda Gregg. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Part 1	Alma
	We Manage Most When We Manage Small	5
	A Game Called Fear	6
	The Girl I Call Alma	7
	The Chorus Speaks Her Words As She Dances	8
	Gnostics on Trial	10
	There She Is	11
	The Woman Who Looks for Her Lost Sister She Says	12
	At the Shore	13
	The Beckett Kit	14
	Sigismundo	16
	The Poet Goes About Her Business	17
	Goethe's Death Mask	18
	Alma in All Seasons	19
	Different Not Less	20
Part 2	The Marriage and After
	The Wife	23
	The Island of Kos	24
	Trouble in the Portable Marriage	25
	The Small Lizard	26
	Together in Greece	27
	Classicism	28
	Alma Watching Her Husband	29
	Whole and Without Blessing	30
	Growing Up	31
	Summer in a Small Town	32
	Unaccountable	33
	After That	34
	No More Marriages	35
	Euridice	36
	Now Destroyed	38
	The Defeated	40
	Too Bright to See	42
	The Apparent	43
Part 3	After That
	Not Singing	47
	Blake	48
	The Gods Must Not Know Us	50
	The Grub	52
	This Place	53
	What If the World Stays Always Far Off	54
	Staying On	57
	Lilith	58
	As When the Blowfish Perishing	60
	Sun Moon Kelp Flower or Goat	61
	Skylord	62
	Alma to Her Sister	63
	The Scent of White	67
	At Home	68
	Me and Aphrodite and the Other	69
	Me and Alma	70
	Alma Thinking about Men	71
	Days	72
	Safe and Beautiful	73
	The Ghosts Poem	74
	The Night before Leaving	82
	Marriage and Midsummer's Night	83
	Winter Birds	84
	Balancing Everything	85
	The Visitor	86
	Figures near a Bridge	87
	Pictures of Marriage	88
	Forget All That	89
	Nor the Moon nor Pretend	90
	Alma in the Woods	91
	The Thing Being Made	92
	At the Gate in the Middle of My Life	93
	Saying Good-Bye to the Dead	94
	Not Saying Much	95
	Oedipus Exceeding	96
	The Shopping-Bag Lady	98
99	Lies and Longing	99
	How the Joy of It Was Used Up Long Ago	100
	What They Ate What They Wore	101
	Coming Home	102
	The Men Like Salmon	103
	Lovers	104
	The Copperhead	105
	Death Looks Down	106
	Pressure against Emptiness	107
	Choosing against Ruins	108
	Innocents	109
	What Is Left Over	110
	Something Scary	111
	New York Address	112
	I Will Remember	113
	Alma in the Dark	114
	Children among the Hills	115
	Dry Grass & Old Color of the Fence & Smooth Hills	116
	Trying to Believe	117
	If Death Wants Me	118
	The River Again and Again	119
	With a Blessing Rather Than Love Said Nietzsche	120
	Lessening	121
	White Light	122
	Adult	123
	Still, Attentive, Clenched	124
	Not Wanting Herself	125
	Saskia and Alma Go Different Ways	126
	Alma Is Willing	129
	Praising Spring	130
	Twelve Years after the Marriage She Tries to Explain	131
	The Woman on Her Knees at the River	132

Editorial Reviews

Too Bright to See is one of the most important first books of poetry to have come out in the last 25 years. Alma, first published in its own volume two years later, has become its necessary companion . . . It's a fine thing to have these two books back in the world, the visible world, bound together, lucid and legible as they are.” —Lucie Brock-Broido

“I consider Linda Gregg one of the best American poets, and I value the neatness of design in her poems, as well as the energy of each line.” —Czeslaw Milosz

“I have loved Linda Gregg's poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.” —W. S. Merwin

“The blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stains the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do.” —Joseph Brodsky

From the Publisher