Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar

Overview

“Lisa Russ Spaar sounds like no other poet writing today.”—Jennifer Chang, The Believer

This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar’s poems are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry. In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892555369
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	1,024,872
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collections of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson; Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems; and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

New Poems: The Madrigals

Adolescence 3

Bachesque 4

Baptist 5

Bill Evansesque 6

Bird in the Hospital 7

Breughelian 8

Columbarium 9

Courtesan 10

Debussy 11

Estival 12

Gradual 13

Great Horned Owls 14

Happy 15

Heath 16

Heavenly 17

Holy Week 18

Lady Bird Taint 19

Last Rose 20

Literature 21

Magnolia Cone 22

Make-Up 23

Mantis 24

Music Box 25

Narcissus 26

Nest 27

November 28

Oyster 29

Pastoral 30

Perseid 31

Persimmon 32

Posthumous 33

Ruby-Crowned Kinglet 34

Spring Onion 35

Sub Rosa 36

Surgical 37

Torso 38

Vin Blank 39

Wasp 40

Wild Strawberry 41

Whole Foods 42

Wolf Spider 43

Wounded Vulture 44

You Better Think 45

Zed 46

from Glass Town (1999)

Hallowe'en 49

Anorexia 50

Rapunzel's Girlhood 51

Insomnia 53

A Doubt 54

Glass Town 55

Reading Jane Eyre on the Grounds of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital 62

from Blue Venus (2004)

Feast of the Veiled Venus 69

Insomnia with William Blake 71

Nocturne 72

Queen Anne's Lace 73

The Insomnia of Thomas Merton 74

The Insomnia of Thomas Edison 77

New Year's Eve 79

Dorothy Wordsworth's Insomnia 80

Self-Portrait 83

Penance I 84

Penance II 85

Penance III 86

Penance IV 87

Penance V 89

from Satin Cash (2008)

Cricket 93

I Consider my Mother's Mind 94

The Ice House 95

Rendezvous 96

After John Donne's Mistress Going to Bed 97

Refrain 98

So 99

Collect for a Separation 100

Sycamore Tantra 101

Ouija 102

Empty Nest 103

Vineyard in Spring 106

Keats House 107

Sabbatical 108

Horizon 109

The Geese 110

from Vanitas, Rough (2012)

St. Protagonist 113

Departures: Chapter One 114

St. Chardonnay 115

Midas Passional 116

Goldfinches 117

Still Life with Hare & Knife 118

Vanitas, Rough 119

Debt 120

Christmas Stoup 121

Trailing Mary & Martha: 3 AM 122

St. Brontë 123

God's Gym 124

The Irises 125

Black Snake 126

Friday Motet 127

Dead Moth 129

Hibernalphilia 130

After the Meeting, a Red Fox 131

from Orexia (2017)

The Wishbone: A Romance 135

Temple Gaudete 136

Owl Hour 137

Baroque Hour 138

Celibacy 1 139

Celibacy 2 140

Temple Age 141

Hare 142

Orexic Hour 143

Trust Hour 1 144

Reading John Clare, Heading North 145

The Whales 147

Accidental 148

Temple Tomb 149

Morel Patch 150

My Father's Dream of Thoreau 151

Duet 153

Temple on my Knees 154

How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone 155