Drift

by KINZIE, MARY

• ISBN13: 9780375709906
• ISBN10: 0375709908
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2005-02-22
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

"The world is touched and stands forth," writes Mary Kinzie in this book of seductive poetic experiment. In lines by turns fragmented and reflective, she shatters and reassembles such curiosities as an engraving by Albrecht Durer and the portrait of a notorious suicide whose children develop a secret telepathy. In one of her many powerful longer pieces, she collects glittering shards from myriad versions of the Cinderella story: Was the young girl running out of it because --recall the blood within the shoe?-- it hurt her? Kinzie's verse moves mysteriously between folk-lore and urban devastation, between white magic and the concoction of mood drugs in the modern laboratory. In each poem, she draws our attention to the chinks of light in the dark narratives that surround us, in a language animated by her sympathy and deep moral intelligence.

Author Biography

Mary Kinzie is the author of<b> A Poet’s Guide to Poetry </b>and five earlier collections, including <b>Summers of</b> <b>Vietnam</b>,<b> Autumn Eros</b>, and <b>Ghost Ship</b>. She teaches in the creative writing program she founded two decades ago at Northwestern University.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>

Table of Contents

Hour on Hour	3	(2)
Farm	5	(2)
Ropework	7	(8)
Poet on Small Hillside	15	(2)
Silverprint	17	(1)
Of foco	18	(1)
Dawn Swim	19	(3)
Air Shaft	22	(1)
Firebrat	23	(1)
Theine	24	(1)
Midwinter	25	(1)
Close Path	26	(1)
Evening at Morning	27	(3)
Book of Tears	30	(16)
Blue Iris	30	(2)
Moment, Stay	32	(2)
Acting to Death	34	(1)
Ladder of Sky	35	(3)
The Figure and Her Daughter	38	(2)
Flederzeug	40	(1)
Secondary Character	41	(2)
La Nausée	43	(3)
Flame Lounge: The Night Behind the Day	46	(10)
Hornbeam	56	(6)
Toxic Songs	62	(2)
The Star Lantern	64	(5)
Drift	69	(3)
After Frost at Midnight	72	(3)
Zeno at Zero	75
The Harriers	74	(1)
Looking In at Night	75	(1)
Objet	76	(3)
Note	79

Excerpts

Close Path

What have I trained forwhat
have the years of
whatever I did
during them
made me
ready to take on
if the tears are to
stream coldly
like long streaks
of rain down the light
brick of the storehouse
and I become
afraid to look
lest the pain
travel
with my breathing
its path
near enough
to disappear
down


From the Hardcover edition.

---

Excerpted from Drift by Mary Kinzie
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.