Creature: Poems

by Marsha de la O

Overview

Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822967231
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Marsha de la O is a lecturer in the English Department at California State University, Channel Islands, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. She is the author of Every Ravening Thing, Antidote for Night, and Black Hope. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Slowdown, and many journals, and she is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband in Ventura, California, where they founded the Ventura County Poetry Project to support local poetry.

Read an Excerpt

EXCERPT FROM “SUDDEN LIGHT” 

 

. . . If I could  

become moonlight on water,  

I might be darkness an eye could 

train itself to navigate. 

A heron takes to air in the end. 

Brokenness is made of breath,  

blue wash of twilight, a glimmering  

spread of wings, like that evening  

my mother flew out of herself 

after they shut off the machine, slipped  

the last needle . . . 

Editorial Reviews

Written during the final five years of her father’s life, Marsha’s powerful collection of poems on love, loss, family, and the natural world beats with wild force and revealing pitch and rhythm.

32 Bar Blues

Marsha de la O’s splendid Creature brims with the wild force these poems seek to track, a holiness lying in ‘needles / in shards’ of brokenness. In poem after exquisite poem De la O turns to that ineffable force as a lens that transfigures the pain of the human condition and discloses that ‘brokenness is made of breath, / blue wash of twilight, a glimmering / spread of wings.’

Laura Reece Hogan

Marsha de la O is gifted with an intensity of language and experience. Creature is continuously surprising, sometimes mysterious; its language is a revelation of emotional impact and spiritual force.

Poetry Flash

Marsha de la O portrays poppies that bloom after wildfires, a child born blue ‘like Krishna,’ a father who died ‘as petals began to brown.’ These are psalms of grief and labor for time passing, ones that sing in multiple registers to remind us that life, in the face of many oppressions, continues, resists, and grows despite anything.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

This is, indeed, a collection with which to experience such uncertainties as if they were sacred. Because they are.

On The Seawall

In Creature, de la O’s rhetorical constructions are faceted, heart-changing things, urgent glimpses into the mythologies of family love and our dramatically intimate relationship with nature over time. Creature doesn’t engage familiar ironies: de la O’s statements probe; her questions posit change. Restless chance is especially vibratory in her hands. The elegies engage rather than simply present life’s insistent, ingenious push toward death, ‘our ritual for vanishing,’ until each story is annealed—for a moment only—and made holy.

Dorothy Barresi

Marsha de la O knows of fire, force of destruction and engine of rebirth.

California Review of Books

Creature is at once lyrical and thoughtful, meditative, brooding, and yet full of hopeful affirmation.

The Lake

To read Marsha de la O’s Creature is to be immersed in timescapes of forest, canyon, and sea where the moment is both ancient and elongated, where language becomes world, suddenly tangible and sensate. Here is the rare gift that calls readers to remember in so many directions at once and makes them feel more whole, more here. Intuitive, wise, vigorous, deep of earth and heart, these pages pulse with ‘the life force whose name is creature.’ I am mesmerized.

Jennifer K. Sweeney

"Creature is at once lyrical and thoughtful, meditative, brooding, and yet full of hopeful affirmation." 
—The Lake

"This is, indeed, a collection with which to experience such uncertainties as if they were sacred. Because they are."
—On The Seawall

"Marsha de la O knows of fire, force of destruction and engine of rebirth."
—California Review of Books​


“In Creature, de la O’s rhetorical constructions are faceted, heart-changing things, urgent glimpses into the mythologies of family love and our dramatically intimate relationship with nature over time. Creature doesn’t engage familiar ironies: de la O’s statements probe; her questions posit change. Restless chance is especially vibratory in her hands. The elegies engage rather than simply present life’s insistent, ingenious push toward death, ‘our ritual for vanishing,’ until each story is annealed—for a moment only—and made holy.”
—Dorothy Barresi, author of What We Did While We Made More Guns
 

“To read Marsha de la O’s Creature is to be immersed in timescapes of forest, canyon, and sea where the moment is both ancient and elongated, where language becomes world, suddenly tangible and sensate. Here is the rare gift that calls readers to remember in so many directions at once and makes them feel more whole, more here. Intuitive, wise, vigorous, deep of earth and heart, these pages pulse with ‘the life force whose name is creature.’ I am mesmerized.” 

—Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of Foxlogic, Fireweed 

“Marsha de la O’s splendid Creature brims with the wild force these poems seek to track, a holiness lying in ‘needles / in shards’ of brokenness. In poem after exquisite poem De la O turns to that ineffable force as a lens that transfigures the pain of the human condition and discloses that ‘brokenness is made of breath, / blue wash of twilight, a glimmering / spread of wings.’” 

—Laura Reece Hogan, author of Butterfly Nebula 

“Marsha de la O portrays poppies that bloom after wildfires, a child born blue ‘like Krishna,’ a father who died ‘as petals began to brown.’ These are psalms of grief and labor for time passing, ones that sing in multiple registers to remind us that life, in the face of many oppressions, continues, resists, and grows despite anything.” 

— Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys 

From the Publisher