Post by moira on May 18, 2008 13:49:45 GMT 2
Apparition Wren
Maureen Alsop[/b]
Sample Poem /Title Poem:
Cortland Review
2River
Apparition Wren
The trill, quivering as the sun crosses
over the half-stretched sound, comes
to quiet now. It's what you've always been:
a little bird shifting past. The felled fruit
lies ripe & wasted in the cherry orchard
marking the place where a very old woman sensed
your nimble rise. She would not know
the careless stint of tilted wing. She kept loving you
as simply as you loved the expectant air. Darkness
gathers in the grass-she rests on her knees
pronouncing your imprint as prayer,
and discovers late your voice
of stone. She sees it is better now,
your dappled song grown
shameless & empty inside the mouth.
Reviews for Apparition Wren:
"The poems in Apparition Wren are sometimes sensual,
sexual, almost rawly empathic to the loneliness and
suffering of the characters she writes about (look at
"Mud Pie Underworld," "Butcher's Wife"); sometimes
Alsop's poems are less narrative, and still
beautifully candid and strange."
--Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain
(2004 National Book Award for Poetry)
“One half prayer book, one half book of prophecy, one
half inner almanac, Maureen Alsop's Apparition Wren
truly overflows with a generous, deeply felt lyricism,
a “dappled song” bursting forth from the mind’s
“delirious dark.” The seemingly calm lyrical pulse at
the center of her poems vibrates outward to include a
wild menagerie of objects, landscapes, and selves.
Suddenly, each poem reveals itself as a contact point
where the sacred and profane change skins, exchange a
weird glance, and then fall back into the book’s
throttling hum. Subtle and spontaneous, meditative and
erotic, Alsop’s is an exciting new voice, expertly
pitched ‘between the chaos and the bramble.’”
– Tony Tost
About the author:
Maureen Alsop's poems have appeared or are pending in
various publications including AGNI, Columbia Journal,
Tampa Review, New Delta Review, Borrow Street, Typo,
and Texas Review, among others. Her poetry was
nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She is
the 2006 winner of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler
Memorial Award in Poetry, the 2007 Frances Locke
Memorial Award in Poetry and Eleventh Muse's Poetry
Prize. I am the author of two chapbooks, Origin of
Stone (liana Press), Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line
Press). Her first full collection of poetry,
Apparition Wren, was a semi-finalist for the Walt
Whitman Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Stan and
Tom Wick Poetry Prize and recently released by Main
Street Rag Press; her second collection of poetry, The
Diction of Moths is pending publication in 2009 with
Ghost Road Press.
ISBN 978-159948-090-9, 66 pages, $14.00
Tradepaper
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