The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
Poems
Will be published approx. on 14. May 2001
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-0-8203-2292-6 (ISBN)
Description
This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world.
Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places-inside and outside the human psyche.
Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places-inside and outside the human psyche.
Reviews / Votes
In The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, the O's of fruit, time, and heavenly bodies cohere in sight and in light, and the heartbreaking yearning, 'the impulse to speak,' is over and over again the Don Quixote of gestures, keeping relationships at once glued and unstuck. The book culminates in a rhapsodic braiding of childhood images of a downscrabble upbringing, and a moving evocation of the ambivalence between the frivolity of speech and its absolute necessity. A deeply resonant book. -- Susan Wheeler Mary Jo Bang's poetry is vivacious and at the same time mysterious. Its surface glitters with the sparkle that the brightest American writing has always given off, and in the depths it reveals a mixture of smoky, quirky complexities, a blend that is hers alone. Characters are driven to distress or exuberance by the fate she has prepared for them-their stories bloom on the page, ripen strangely, and quickly disappear. I love it. -- John Tranter * editor of <i>Jacket Magazine</i> *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
113 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-2292-6 (9780820322926)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
MARY JO BANG is also the author of Apology for Want, winner of the Bakeless Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Louise in Love, winner of the Poetry Society's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She has received a Discovery/the Nation Award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.