Bestiary

by Elise Paschen

Overview

“The poems in Elise Paschen’s Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world,” praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or “Book of Beasts,” the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers’ eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.

Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091312
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/01/2009
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Elise Paschen is the author of three poetry collections: Infidelities (Story Line), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Houses: Coasts (Sycamore Press, Oxford), and, most recently, Bestiary (Red Hen Press).  She is editor of Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks Expanded (Sourcebooks) and Poetry in Motion (Norton).Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

I

Monarch                                                                                  3

Barn Owl and Moon                                                                4

Engagement                                                                              5

Moving In                                                                                 7

Fertility                                                                         9

Trapeze                                                                                    10

Birth                                                                                         11

The Flycatcher’s Fall                                                                12

Prey                                                                                         13

Miss Spider’s Guests                                                                15

Hive                                                                                         16

Sanctuary                                                                                 17

Under Siege                                                                             19

II

Wi’-gi-e                                                                                   21

Warning Signs                                                                          23

Afterward                                                                                 24

Behind the Swan                                                                       25

Ghost-Echo                                                                              26

Disappearing Act                                                                      27

Solstice in Snow                                                                       28

Pond in Winter                                                             29

Sea-Change                                                                             30

Isthmus                                                                         31

Squibnocket                                                                             32

Chancing Upon Manatees                                                         34

Raccoon on a Branch                                                               36

III

The Broken Swan                                                                     38                               

Ash                                                                                          40

Eurydice                                                                                   41

Mary of Magdala                                                                      43

Outside the Tomb                                                                     45

Farewell                                                                                   46

Under the Dome                                                                       47

Cicadas                                                                                    49

Crossing                                                                                   51

Cradle-Song                                                                             52

Threshold                                                                                 53

Feast for the Living                                                                   54

First Snow                                                                                55

Magnificent Frigatebird                                                 56

Acknowledgments                                                                    57

Editorial Reviews

Can a book so attached to death be filled with so much life?  The answer is yes and Bestiary proves it!   It is focused also on form and light and wonder; a fine song of praise to living things.  All praise to this brave poet and these brave poems!

—-Lucille Clifton

With Bestiary Elise Paschen comes into her own strength as a poet, taking on the two great subjects of lyric poetry, love and death. This volume beautifully contains its opposites:  it is at once the story of a young couple building their family and the story of a daughter losing her parents, as well as a more mythic undertaking, a tale of the animals who symbolize our psyches and seem to foreshadow events in our human lives.  One feels Paschen’s Osage roots in these poems where she makes the deepest emotions palpable through her stunning craft.  In Bestiary Elise Paschen creates a world at once recognizable and strange, lyrical and fierce, gentle and bold. 

—-Molly Peacock

Elise Paschen’s themes are human and essential: love and gestation and birth, the decline of parents in old age — and in her skilled hands, these matters seem far from ordinary.   Often her poems engage us with stories, some taken from myth — Leda beset by Zeus in swan’s clothing, a mad Irish princess tamed by a harp player.  Others seem drawn from experience, whether actual or imaginary: a woman thrown to the ground by a whirlwind, a family rescuing a fallen nestling, an aged and afflicted mother recalling her youth as a dancer in Venice, a daughter transporting a father’s ashes through airport security.  Here are powerful lines, gracefully woven into whole poems, positioned to last.  Certain of them will haunt you.  Read the lovely and mysterious “Monarch,” first poem in the book, and right away you’ll see what I mean.

—X. J. Kennedy

From the Publisher