
My Shining Archipelago
Talvikki Ansel(Author)
Yale University Press
Will be published approx. on 1. May 1997
Book
Paperback/Softback
70 pages
978-0-300-07032-3 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition
Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, "Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin." This cycle of "freewheeling sonnets" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.
Flemish Beauty
Yesterday, all winter,
I had not thought of pears, considered:
pear. The tear-shaped, papery core,
precise seeds. This one channeled
through with worm tunnels.
Bruises, a rotten half-
sometimes there's nothing left
to drop into the pot.
That phrase
I could have said: "you still
have us . . . "
The knife
slides easily beneath the skins,
top to base, spiraling
them away.
The insubstantial us.
It could as well be the pear
talking to the river, turning to
the grass ("you still have us").
Besides, it's just me
a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full
of peels)-and sometimes, yes, that
seems enough: a pear-
this larger one,
yellow-green, turning to red:
"Duchess" maybe, "Devoe,"
or what I want to call it: "Flemish
Beauty."
When I can't sleep,
I'll hold my hand as if I held
a pear, my fingers mimicking
the curve. The same curve
as the newel post
I've used for years, swinging
myself up to the landing, always
throwing my weight back. And always
nails loosening, mid-bound.
Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, "Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin." This cycle of "freewheeling sonnets" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.
Flemish Beauty
Yesterday, all winter,
I had not thought of pears, considered:
pear. The tear-shaped, papery core,
precise seeds. This one channeled
through with worm tunnels.
Bruises, a rotten half-
sometimes there's nothing left
to drop into the pot.
That phrase
I could have said: "you still
have us . . . "
The knife
slides easily beneath the skins,
top to base, spiraling
them away.
The insubstantial us.
It could as well be the pear
talking to the river, turning to
the grass ("you still have us").
Besides, it's just me
a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full
of peels)-and sometimes, yes, that
seems enough: a pear-
this larger one,
yellow-green, turning to red:
"Duchess" maybe, "Devoe,"
or what I want to call it: "Flemish
Beauty."
When I can't sleep,
I'll hold my hand as if I held
a pear, my fingers mimicking
the curve. The same curve
as the newel post
I've used for years, swinging
myself up to the landing, always
throwing my weight back. And always
nails loosening, mid-bound.
Reviews / Votes
"Ansel's poems are surprising and imaginative, filled with fresh insight into the natural world."-Maura Stanton, Ploughshares"Ansel crafts a poetic line of measured, sustained grace and elegance, most often without rhyme or music, but with a hushed, almost feverish suspension of breath. Her vision reveals a world in movement. . . . An exciting debut by a distinctive new poetic voice already in command of considerable gifts."-America
Winner of the 2001 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers awarded by Washington and Lee University
"Ansel's poetry is refreshingly original. She renders the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed, the lurking, the waiting to happen. This is true imagination, true craft."-James Dickey, from the foreword
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
110 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-07032-3 (9780300070323)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Talvikki Ansel attended Connecticut College and received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and an M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, Poetry East, and Shenandoah. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University.