The Ada Poems

by ZARIN, CYNTHIA

• ISBN13: 9780307272478
• ISBN10: 0307272478
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-21
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

A luminous new collection inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokovrs"s novelAda, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,who was the lifelong love of her half brother. These stunning poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things-the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies-collide with the speakerrs"s own tale of desire and loss. In the opening poem, "Birch," Zarin writes, "Abide with me, arrive / at its skinned branches, its arms pulled / from the sapling . . . the birch all elbows, taking us in." With a dazzling string of contemporary sonnets as its spine, the book is a headlong display of mastery and sorrow. Zarin doesnot"Destroy and forget!" as Nabokovrs"s witty, tender Ada would have her do. Instead, like all enduring love poetry, these poems are a gorgeous refusal to forget. A riveting, high-stakes performance, pulled off with exceptional grace by one of our major poets.

Author Biography

Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of three previous books of poetry—The Watercourse, Fire Lyric, and The Swordfish Tooth—and several books for children. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.