Post by shayepoet on Nov 10, 2008 3:21:37 GMT 2
American Desire
Patricia Brody
A jet-winged eavesdropping angel, Brody sweeps in among the great ones, sight and sword keen and apt. In a suite of dramatic monologues, her poems do their voices, streaming in high style. It takes her excited language and true wit to give us these vivid spirits - of Byron, the Wordsworths, Heloise, the Gentileschi,& plenty more women, musing among men, affording us their hotly imagined revelations .
--Marie Ponsot
Sample poems:
Althea, American Fire
Mother named me goddess, long-limbed.
I broke the barrier
my hair the night let down
loose from its Gibson knot, spilling
past shoulders to cover bare arms.
Mulberry lips dusky skin
limbs quick and light as if I leapt
colors spilling
from an Isadora dawn.
I didn’t laugh or wink. My long swing
swept the court for Venus & Serena.
The Times suggested my life
lacked something.
Leaving – as the Times must –
the life
spilled. I slammed that ball
straight to the mulberry sun.
Look with awe.
River of hair, river of white dress,
berry-lips pressed down.
Watch me pour
my self into the sun’s waiting arms.
Long shimmer on grass.
Such delicacy. Iron limbs,
the p-l-o-ck! of catgut on wool-skin,
the crowd’s gasp.
My shadow leaps, my stroke is
lightning,
long and lithe.
How do I not die?
--Althea Gibson (1927-2003), Grand Slam and Wimbledon tennis star.
Excerpt from Dangerous to Know
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”
Lady Caroline
Lamb’s journal entry, on first meeting Lord Byron, 1812
I’ve been chilling with these dead people,
not just reading their letters and poems
but going to their balls.
I’ve been under their clothes
in their skins,
sticking to dampened petticoats
and floaty muslin.
I’m at Devonshire House;
Lady Someone is my mother.
At Brocket I’m running through the trees,
a lordly satyr at my heels, his lip
curled, his brow furred, pale skin agleam...
Fly me, says the mad corsair.
Deep-drugged in the night
I creep from bed, Lord M stretched
senseless beside me.
Down through Georgiana’s garden
I fall, down to the white hawthorn...
Raves and reviews for American Desire:
"I've been chilling with dead people,/not just reading their letters and poems/but going to their balls" says Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron's chronicler, in "Dangerous to Know." Patricia Brody's new chapbook, American Desire, suggests a revival of the ironic persona poem, using voices of past women artists. Of course, conventions of this kind of poem must be made new – Brody accomplishes this by moving easily from formal to the freest free verse,its diction and decorum, energetic mixtures of high and low.--The reader will be rewarded, discovering that poem after poem discloses its own, new experiment in form.
--Philip Miller, poet/editor, Chance of a Ghost
"Herrick or Byron, Artemisia or Heloise, if the breath of life stirs, Brody reaches for it, grabs the first branch, the last crotch (we're talking trees here) and tugs until the "root of things" comes away in her hand, free of the past:
Broken stanzas, triturated
but free."
--Richard Howard, critic
About the author:
Patricia Brody’s poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, Barrow Street, The Paris Review, and on Poetry Daily. Her work also appeared in Psychoanalytic Perspectives and Junctures (New Zealand) and in the anthology Chance of a Ghost. She is editing Survival of the Soul: Artists Living with Illness, an anthology of contemporary poems, prose and art. Awards include two Pushcart Prize nominations and two Academy of American Poets prizes.
Her chapbook, American Desire , a series of poems “in the voices of “ women artists from past centuries, will be out from Finishing Line Books in January 2009.
Brody has a family therapy practice in New York City and teaches English Comp and American Literature at Boricua College in Harlem. She has three children.
ISBN::1-59924-339-3
ISBN 978-1-59924-339-9, $14.95
Finishing Line Press, January 15, 2009
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www.finishinglinepress.com