The Water Books
Published on 1. January 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-932870-54-1 (ISBN)
Description
Judith Vollmer's The Water Books does a stunning job of blending natural images within an urbane setting. Whether it be Pittsburgh, a bus, a phone conversation Vollmer's attention to detail is unparalleled.
Reviews / Votes
"The Water Books is a remarkable achievement for its tough wit and shimmering beauties. Vollmer is both guardian and scribe, with a naturalist's sharp-eyed ethos that snakes through watery realms, clear up to the Northern Lights and down to her own 'fire-rings' topaz and saffron stars.' As above so below. Her Rome and Pittsburgh meet as vivid-equally adored-parallel gem-lines in a magnanimous space. She kindles a bonfire for Pasolini and calls out hunter Cheney ('O great black mask of death') with a Keatsian capability. These poems are feats of a heightened, familial, and adhesive consciousness, very good news for us all." -Anne Waldman"I have long been an admirer of Judith Vollmer's poems, and The Water Books is her best collection thus far. She is a poet of dizzying tonal and stylistic range, offering searching meditative poems, vividly rendered character portraits and elegies, and short poems of epigrammatic precision. Above all, she has an unerring ability to arrive at those moments when quotidian objects and events are suddenly given the aura of something more vast and more vexing: call it historical force. Benjamin's Angel of History presides over these poems, and Vollmer ably serves this stern and powerful muse." -David Wojahn
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Pittsburgh
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-932870-54-1 (9781932870541)
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
JUDITH VOLLMER'S previous collections have received the Brittingham, the Center for Book Arts, and the Cleveland State publication prizes. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her essays and reviews are included in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and is a founding editor of the literary journal 5 AM.