Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1976

by Eleanor Wilner

Overview

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems—an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them—new life seeded out of a decaying order: “a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.” Written during the poet’s immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099226
Publisher:	Crooked Hearts Press
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eleanor Wilner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems (Princeton UniversityPress, 2019) and Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Her awards include the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America; fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the NEA; the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart prizes. Her poems have appeared in more than fifty anthologies, including the 2014 and 2016 editions of Best American Poetry. She has taught for many years for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Table of Contents

To the Reader 11

I Early Poems 1963-1973

Prelude

Ritual 21

i In for it now

Mother of Pearl 25

Ripeness 27

Reveries in an Old Dawn 29

Tracks, at a Remove 31

Pastoral 33

Country Cousin 34

Undoing 36

ii Locked in

March Return 39

Even the Hands Ache 40

Resistance 41

Stasis 43

Daphne 44

No Trespassing 45

Brochure on the Humanities 46

iii Looking back

Admission Paid: Fort McHenry and Other Shrines 51

Fever 53

The Last Tapestry 54

The Invention of Writing 56

For a Russian Writer in Exile 57

MONT ST. MICHEL 59

Eastern Front, Western Range 60

Solstice Song 61

iv Bringing it down

Alarms 65

Lynda Bird's Lullaby 67

Lingua Franca 68

Scale Shift 69

Notations for a Song 70

Creation Story 71

Almost There 72

v Crossing

Crossing the Equator 75

Escape 77

Repair 78

Defection 79

On the Beach 81

Ariadne's Prayer 83

The Expedience of Emblems 85

II After That: Uncollected Poems

Out of the Unlikely, We Come to Dance 89

The Poets' Competition at Barcelona 90

A Green Blues for Etheridge 91

Recycled Song 92

That Story 94

Reading the News 95

Brother Cloud 97

What do myths have to do with the price of fish? 98

Olympus and the End of Winter 102

Notes 107

Editorial Reviews

"The distinguished poet Eleanor Wilner is widely celebrated for the chiseled elegance of her verse and the breadth of her vision. Wilner can sizzle with outrage as she exposes the sordid roots of violence and greed, or distill the substance of critical mythopoesis into essential poetry. We see qualities in the early poetry collected in this volume—the profound ethical sensibility, the meticulous observations of nature and society, the stringent wit—that will come to define this great poet’s mature work. In these sparkling poems, we discover her fierce compassion in incipient form. And in the trenchant personal poem ('What do myths have to do with the price of fish?'), we glimpse the patronization that an aspiring young poet coming of age in the middle of the last century confronted as she made her way. Gone to Earth is a beautiful gift of a book!" —Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

"Haunted by history, grounded by mountains and rivers, irradiated by myth, torn between rage and the love of life, made enchanting by the voluptuous music of its language, Wilner's early poetry is lit with insight from within. In a poem defending the uses of myth, there’s a scene where 'silent / women in outdated robes walk slowly, / as figures move through centuries, / like the memory of patience.' Oh, but there’s Marianne Moore, and a bit to her left, there's Muriel Rukeyser. Wilner is factual, prophetic, and a shaman for our times." —Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

From the Publisher