Post by shayepoet on Aug 31, 2008 1:34:23 GMT 2
No Heaven
Alicia Ostriker
Taking her cue from John Lennon’s provocative ballad, Imagine, Alicia Suskin Ostriker
wrestles with the world as it is in her new collection, No Heaven. Lennon wrote, No hell below us /
above us only sky; Ostriker describes what she sees in between—a world of cities, of art and music,
love and war, bitterness and hope. Steadfast, she pursues her poetics of ardor, and a passion for the
here and now that has gained her a legion of devoted readers.
Sample poem:
From ELEGY BEFORE THE WAR
VII
She cried when she read Shakespeare,
She taught me not to hit or hate
Anybody, she thought education was the answer, she said most people
Were ignorant and superstitious but not us,
I miss her hugs though they were like clamps,
I miss her voice though she often mysteriously screamed
With rage at us all, the shopkeepers, the neighbors.
Why was she crazy, her beauty and intellect wasted, was it America,
The goldene medina just a joke, land of bankers and lynch mobs
In her girlhood, land of brokers and bombs at her death?
Hammer to which everything is a nail?
Or was it her pretty mother with the golden voice
And the golden hands that could sew anything
Not loving her enough, the way she claimed?
Or was it a tricky couple of cells?
Little magicians sawing the woman in half?
My mother’s secrets die with her,
The obsession with germs
The obsession with money
The anger at the world for cheating her.
Where did she go, my hopeful young mother,
My mother who promised we would overcome
The bosses and bigots? I want her. I want her
To come back and try again.
April 2002—February 2003
Praise and reviews for No Heaven:
"As attentive to injustice as it is to the varieties of the sensual life, No Heaven is evidence of a deep engagement with what it means and feels like to be a person of high consciousness in the early twenty-first century. It gives us Ostriker at her most capacious."
--Stephen Dunn
"No Heaven is a terrific book-- just what poetry should be: at once moving, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and new because it opens heart and mind again. Death is always present as real, heightening consciousness. Every poem contains "a piercing glance into the life of things," as Marianne Moore said, a unity of soul and form. Ostriker reveals the horror and sacredness of everyday life by constantly reinventing the words believed to be ordinary, here transformed. Buy this beautiful collection and find yourself in no heaven but on incandescent eternal ephemeral earth -- the place to be human."
--Jane Augustine (Amazon review)
"Alicia Ostriker is a quintessential American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser. No Heaven is the follow-up to Ostriker's brilliant Volcano Sequence (lamentably left off the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award lists)--and here once again we find Ostriker writing poems about real people, crucial human experience and the spiritual essence that runs through everything. No Heaven is a brilliant collection that is hard hitting ("Liking It," "Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It," "Elegy before the War,"), tender ("Brooklyn Twilight," "In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage"), and humorous ("When we leap, we hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap" from "Pickup," ". . .when/that brilliant Jew poet took/The train for the next world/American nirvana/Temporarily went with him" from "Elegy for Allen.") No Heaven contains crucial poems for our misguided times from one of America's (or should I say the world's?) best, bravest, and most eloquent poets."
--Richard Tayson, (Amazon Review)
"No Heaven is Ostriker at her best. The elegiac poems that sing to her dead mother and characterize an eroding America as 'this moon-shaped blackness' are deeply compelling."
--Maxine Kumin
"In No Heaven Alicia Ostriker is at the top of her form. The poems 'hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap' -- no need of heaven when the living can perform such feats."
--Diane Middlebook
About the author:
Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, was a finalist for the National Book Award for The Crack in Everything (Pittsburgh 1996) and The Little Space (Pittsburgh 1998), and has published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven (Pittsburgh 2005). She is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Beacon 1986) and other books on poetry and on the Bible including For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Her most recent critical book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic.
She has received awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Society of America, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center, among others. Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University. Ostriker has taught in the Princeton University Creative Writing Program and in Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program. She has taught midrash writing workshops in the USA, Israel, England and Australia.
Website
Poetry Foundation
PF article by Daisy Fried
Poets.org
*****
Listen to another selection -- Daffodils -- from No Heaven!
*****
ISBN: O -8229-5875-9, 136 pages, $12.95
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
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UPP: tinyurl.com/6gnblh (800-621-2736)
Amazon: tinyurl.com/686ytc
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For signature copy ($12.00): ostriker@rci.rutgers.edu