Post by shayepoet on Sept 18, 2008 8:25:32 GMT 2
Causeway
Elaine Sexton
“In their plainspoken engagement with the actual world, Elaine Sexton’s poems
are models of scrupulous attention, alert to the simple truth that everything is part of some
bigger mystery so even a fish can sing a psalm, a simple shoe be the subject of one. The poems in this impressive
second collection contain the sound of a consciousness meditating on what is passing in the world and abiding in the heart
and mind. Elegy without sentimentality seems a natural part of Sexton’s keen-eared lyric manner and, in every sense, responsibility. Lodged in various locales, whether urban or rural, earthbound or on the open sea, answering
a landscape, a family memory, or the vagaries of love, the poems of Causeway are always informed
by an honest buoyancy of spirit that can mix the scent of lilacs with smokers’ coughs,
as imagination testifies to the hard-won realization that
Even in these / toxic times, we live, we thrive."
—Eamon Grennan
Sample Poem:
Night. Fire
When we looked up after hours of staring
at a crimp in a log, the shooting blue
flames, puffs of smoke,
the tide that was right here had gone
way out, so the waves were now strokes of gray
in the distance, and the dark night closed in
on us, everywhere at once.
Everywhere at once the sky was touchable,
for of course it was right here, over us,
as well as way out over the smaller and smaller waves,
coming forward but still going out.
Corning forward but still going out, leaving
us to watch this crashing in and in
yet each time receding, the way our conversation
happened along those same lines.
Along those lines we managed a few
untouchable subjects, the way we imagine
we can touch a star or the moon on a night like this
but know we really can't. We imagine we see
everything more clearly, but that doesn't work
with the past. Which is what we were dealing with—
in the way families try to deal with this sort of thing.
Families deal with this sort of thing
poorly, so far as I can tell, and so when the bon-
fire loosened its hold and we stretched our mysteries out
over the sand, the way we'd never do over a meal
in one or the other's house, we heard
the lips of one wave touch another as if each spoke for us.
And words came slowly, or didn't come at all
Slowly, or sometimes not at all, seemed better
than never. And never seemed to be coming
forward like the sky, which is always so close
and receding at the same time.
Also appears at: Poetry Daily
*****
*****
Praise and reviews for Causeway:
“Happiness in love, what a joke," Paul Eluard wrote to Gala in a letter dated 6 March, 1933, and three-quarters of a century later Elaine Sexton, in her second superb volume, struggles against such cynicism in poems that address every estuary of love—filial love, romantic love, spiritual love—without refusing to taste the grit. Again and again the poet attempts to reconcile herself to the everyday obscene, always searching for home / in a thrift shop find, something a mother, / not yours or mine, left behind. Causeway celebrates the probability of such human connection in poems taut and insistent and resonant with desire. When Sexton writes, speaking for us all, [T]he ones / who love me love me, god knows why, we know she’s not quite joking.”
—Michael Waters
"...Causeway is full of strong, tactile values -- there is light glaring off water, stiff salt breezes, smells of brine and rot, shivers that come from thinking you see something in the dark. Perhaps Sexton's strongest suit is a refreshing understatement that lets the reader come away quietly moved, never hammered at.
...Its poems are elegant lessons in attention, quietly letting us know that even when things aren't going so well (which may be most of the time), there is a great gift in just paying attention."
—Diane Schenker for Coldfront (March 2008)
About the author:
Elaine Sexton is the author of Causeway (2008) and Sleuth (2003), both collections of poems with New Issues Press (Western Michigan University). Her poems, reviews, and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, ARTnews, Lambda Book Report, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Poetry Daily, the Writer’s Chronicle and numerous other periodicals. She teaches at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and works in magazine publishing.
On-line interview:
Book Critics Circle: Critical Mass
Small Press Spotlight: Elaine Sexton
Saturday, June 07, 2008
ISBN: 1-930974-77-9 / 978-1-930974-77-7
New Issues Poetry & Prose (Western Michigan University)
April 2008, 71 pages, $14.00 Trade Paper
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