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Overview
Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.
In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air—a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.
Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691193328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2019 |
| Series: | Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets , #142 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
New Poems (2011-2017)
I Fair is foul, and foul is fair
When Vision Narrows to a Single Beam of Light 4
Tracking 6
The Aquadum 8
Underworld 9
The Photographer on Assignment 11
Parable of the Eyes 13
Elegy in Glass and Stone 14
Daedalus, the Exile, Thinks of His Son 16
Under the Table 17
Blue Reflection 19
The Phoenix Reflects on Its Peculiar Situation 20
Turning 22
II An Answering Music
In Memoriam 26
Wingspan 28
Homage 29
Another Allegory of the Cave 30
Sowing 32
An Answering Music to Lines by Sam Hamill 34
Endings, from a Verse by Gwendolyn Brooks 37
To Think of How Cold 39
Gnawed Bone, Covered Bridge 40
Writing in Sand While Walking in Walt's Footprints 42
III Lifelines
Bird's-Eye View, Close-up, a Retrospective 44
What the Kite Sees 46
Intimations 48
Moonlit Wake 50
Shells 52
Unmoved 54
For the First Time 55
Before Our Eyes 57
The Uses of What Is Hollow 58
Ars Poetica, 2017 59
Listen 62
From Tourist in Hell (2010)
History as Crescent Moon 66
Magnificat 67
In a Time of War 69
The Show Must Go On 71
Establishment 73
Saturday Night 75
Encounter in the Local Pub 77
What Loves, Takes Away 79
Voices from the Labyrinth: Minos, Ariadne, Daedalus, Minotaur 81
From the Girl with Bees in her Hair (2004)
Everything Is Starting 88
Field of Vision 90
What Narcissus Gave the Lake 91
Moon Gathering 93
"Don't look so scared. You're alive!" 94
This Straw and Manure World 96
Just So Story 97
Found in the Free Library 99
The Girl with Bees in Her Hair 101
Be Careful What You Remember 103
From Reversing the Spell, New and Selected Poems (1993-1996)
Trümmerfrauen (The Rubble-Women) 106
Middle-Class Vantage 108
Facing into It 110
On Ethnic Definitions 112
Of a Sun She Can Remember 113
The Messenger 114
Up Against It 117
From Otherwise (1993)
Night Fishing in the Sound 122
Being as I Was, How Could I Help … 124
The Muse 126
The Bird in the Laurel's Song 128
Ume: Plum 130
Bat Cave 133
Rhapsody, with Rain 137
From Sarah's Choice (1989)
Reading the Bible Backwards 140
Sarah's Choice 143
The Last Man 147
Miriam's Song 149
Postscript 151
Classical Proportions of the Heart 155
Conversation with a Japanese Student 158
High Noon at Los Alamos 161
From Shekhinah (1984)
Emigration 164
Without Regret 166
Ars Poetica 168
The World Is Not a Meditation 170
The Fourth David 174
My Mothers Portrait 178
Labyrinth 182
In medias res 185
Ex libris 187
From Maya (1979)
Landing 190
Unstrung 192
Bailing Our: A Poem for the Seventies 194
Epitaph 196
Iphigenia, Setting the Record Straight 198
East of the Sun, West of the Moon 200
Natural History 202
Maya 203
The Round Fish 205
Notes 207
What People are Saying About This
"Before books, the ancients had their memory theaters to treasure and keep in reach all they knew. Eleanor Wilner's memory theater is a vast and glorious gathering of years of poems that question, deepen, rage, inspire, and connect. Working from myth and history, through grief and edgy expanse, Wilner is our oracle, the generous troubling overvoice of our age, our light, our dark, and our best."—Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief "Eleanor Wilner's poems, old and new, are political in the best sense—her deep commitment to justice enhances her commitment to making good poems, which she achieves by wit, astonishing lyric skill, and compassionate intelligence. This is a gorgeously important selection of the work of one of our best poets."—Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice"There are poems in this book that I have carried in my head for decades now. They have helped me love, grieve, praise, and, at the appropriate moments, curse. It steels my spirit to know that Eleanor Wilner is still out there so avidly and lovingly attending to this hurt world of ours."—Christian Wiman, author of Once in the West
Praise for Eleanor Wilner's previous books
"[Wilner's] sudden flights of lyricism are disarming and dazzling."—New York Times Book Review
"There is so much that is impressive in Wilner's mature poems. In an era which has been labelled 'The End of History,' she examines history's less obvious lessons. If the past is to teach us, she seems to say, then we must re-invent and re-shape it."—Poetry