Post by moira on May 17, 2008 11:51:04 GMT 2
Scholarship Girl
Lesley Wheeler
With acute formal awareness, Lesley Wheeler makes urgent and
undeniably present the "sedimentary language of an inherited
past. "No elegies here," Scholarship Girl fuses lyrical
invention with the "blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin" world of
memory--the poems richly drawn intermixtures of narrative
and place.
Sample poem:
Scholarship Girl
Liverpool, 1953
The scholarship girl paces to school
along broken sidewalks.
No one has cleaned the war up yet.
She swings her Shakespeare
against the wool on her hip,
her homemade blues.
Because she is tall,
she will play Caesar.
She will be smaller when she grows up.
cockroaches will do their part.
She will study nursing
and go down to the laundry at night.
First she will tip the door open,
then stretch to reach the chain.
The light will reflect from a thousand
shiny carapaces scuttling away,
shrinking like a skirt in hot water,
like lines forgotten suddenly.
But first there are rationed eggs,
and her sister calling Elephant eyes,
and scholarship girls quarantined
in one crowded classroom.
Caesar’s speeches will deflate
her one hot puff at a time
till she fits in anybody’s pocket:
the starchy white one of the Sister
who docks her bus fare
in fine for laddered stockings,
or mine, or even yours. Listen
for her nails scratching
against the fabric.
Review for Scholarship Girl:
"Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool..."
"Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance..."
"In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time."
-- Rachel Dacus
Her Circle Ezine: tinyurl.com/5gjhha
About the author:
Lesley Wheeler's most recent books are Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present and Scholarship Girl; her poems appear in Poetry, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is Professor and Chair of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
ISBN-13: 978-1599242262, $12.00
Finishing Line Press, 2007
[glow=teal,2,300]BUY HERE, BUY NOW:[/glow]
Finishing Line Press: tinyurl.com/2lc4vc
Amazon: tinyurl.com/5bjg7q