Post by moira on May 16, 2008 19:59:50 GMT 2
The Revisionist's Dream
Renee Ashley[/b]
In The Revisionist's Dream, I went back to my comparative literature roots
and tried to put parts of my experience into a context that was more rooted,
more deeply contextual than my own life felt at the time. Only a couple of
the poems are factual life-spinoffs; the book isn't really autobiographical
at all. More, the poems became vessels to hold what I felt I was at the
time. I particularly liked James Richardson's blurb; he seemed to really
understand the nature of the poems (and, besides, he was very kind): "'In
the end, you are everything,' says The Revisionist's Dream, 'tree, mountain,
fish/in the mirrored stream, blue heart/pounding like a fish in the chest.'
Renee Ashley is fascinated by the strange shapes and stranger stories desire
makes of us. She easily manages the cosmic scale, from the head voice of
prophetic authority through the middle tones of spousal intimacy, tender and
resentful, all the way down to the large-eyed silence of dogs, so often her
symbol of the blunt, impenetrable life that knows, even when we don't, that
we belong to it. With her silvery poise and steely resolve, Ashley is an
angel just a little too shrewd and gutsy and heartbroken to belong in
heaven. She's a poet, that is, and she brings us a book of such wisdom and
work and passion that we call it a vision."
Sample poem:
The Revisionist's Dream
Old as seawater. And the dream as large as a sea.
We dream like that. And longer than that. Wider.
And hear the sound of bleak bells like flat stone
on flat stone. We stand -- our hands are empty
and the floor is steep, the floor is a deep sea
with fish like stones who call like bells. Like
brittle bells. And the song is running water.
And the water is rising.
And the prison we choose
is narrow, and we swear we never dreamed those walls.
So the way the light breaks out from the night
is how we break away, how we carry our lives
like a sack or a sadness -- and we are just a river;
the water is sweet is shallow is slow but the dream
is dark and smoky, like a woman's hair let down.
It winds like that.
Reviews for The Revisionist's Dream:
"In the end, you are everything," says The Revisionist's Dream, "tree, mountain, fish/in the mirrored stream, blue heart/pounding like a fist in the chest." Renee Ashley is fascinated by the strange shapes and stranger stories desire makes of us. She easily manages the cosmic scale, from the head voice of prophetic authority through the middle tones of spousal intimacy, tender and resentful, all the wan down to the large-eyed silence of dogs, so often her symbol of the blunt, impenetrable life that knows, even when we don't, that we belong to it. With her silvery poise and steely resolve, Ashley is an angel just a little too shrewd and gutsy and heartbroken to belong in heaven. She's a poet, that is, and she brings us a book of such wisdom and work and passion that we call it a vision."
-- James Richardson
"Renee Ashley transforms ancient myths and invents modern allegories. Here is a poetry that is elemental, hypnotic and sonorous. Like a jeweler examining a stone for the quality of the cut, the consistency and color of brilliance, in poem after poem, we feel an intense and wise scrutiny, and witness an intelligence that infuses the object of its gaze with possibilities, and then, to dazzling effect, varies and multiplies perspectives. Here are chord-changing boleros of the psyche and heart and dreamscapes where nothing ever stands still and "the story changes all the time."
-- Gray Jacobik
"Ms Ashley reminds us with a sweet succinctness that originality has to do with what is very old, with origins indeed, in order to have much truck with the New -- always a doubtful proposition. The dreams she attributes to her Revisionist are indeed the ordering of ancient visions, made new with a full heart, a clear mind."
-- Richard Howard
About the author:
Renée Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry: Salt (Brittingham
Prize in Poetry), The Various Reasons of Light, and The Revisionist's Dream,
as well as a novel, Someplace Like This, and a chapbook, The Museum of Lost
Wings. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the
Arts in both poetry and prose and a poetry fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts. She is co-poetry editor for The Literary Review, and
on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's low-residency MFA
Program in Creative Writing. Her craft essay "Ut Pictura Poesis: The
Painting in the Poem" appeared in Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and
Aesthetics and "Writing on the Brink: Peripheral Vision and the Personal
Poem" in AWP's The Writer's Chronicle. Her personal essays have appeared in
Writers on the Job and Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the
Creative Process. She received an MA in Comparative Literature from San
Francisco State University.
ISBN 0-9705049-2-6, 65 pages, $12.95
Trade paper
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