The Bird Catcher

by PONSOT, MARIE

• ISBN13: 9780375701320
• ISBN10: 037570132X
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

In 1998, Marie Ponsot was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, confirming the praise that has been bestowed on her by critics and peers--among them Eavan Boland and Carolyn Kizer (who are quoted on the back of the book jacket) and Amy Clampitt, who had this to say of Ponsot's last book: "She is marvelously attuned to the visual and to the audible. She is no less precisely a geographer of the interior life, above all the experience of being a woman."

Author Biography

Marie Ponsot's first book of poems was <b>True Minds</b>; later books are <b>Admit Impediment</b> and <b>The Green Dark.</b> She is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, and Columbia University. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing grant, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

Table of Contents

To the Muse of Doorways Edges Verges	p. 3
"I've Been Around: It Gets Me Nowhere"	p. 7
Restoring My House	p. 9
"Trois Petits Tours et Puis..."	p. 11
Old Mama Saturday	p. 12
Northampton Style	p. 13
Incomparable Assumptions	p. 14
The Title's Last	p. 16
Gradual	p. 17
One Is One	p. 18
Pourriture Noble	p. 19
For My Old Self, At Notre-Dame	p. 21
The Border	p. 25
Separate, In the Swim	p. 27
The Story After the Story	p. 29
Living Room	p. 31
After the Pastoral	p. 32
Autumn Clean-up	p. 33
Roundstone Cove	p. 34
Non-Vegetarian	p. 35
Unplugged	p. 36
Better	p. 37
Reminder	p. 38
We Are Imagined	p. 39
The Split Image of Attention	p. 43
Reading a Large Serving Dish	p. 44
Skimming Raw Folk Material	p. 45
Analysis	p. 46
Birthday	p. 47
Endoxa, or, Reputable Opinions	p. 49
Around a Beautiful Theory	p. 50
Two Questions	p. 54
A Determined Present	p. 57
Movers and Shakers	p. 58
In Favor of Good Dreams	p. 59
Pre-Text	p. 60
For Djuna Barnes as Julie Ryder	p. 61
Taking Thought	p. 62
Explorers Cry Out Unheard	p. 65
Winter	p. 66
All Wet	p. 67
Snap Shots	p. 69
Underbutter	p. 71
Persephone, Packing	p. 72
Festival of Bread	p. 74
Full Moon, Unstressed Measures	p. 75
Oceans	p. 78
Foreign Correspondent	p. 79
Against the Dark, New Poets Rise	p. 81
What the Worn Rhymes Found	p. 82
Climbing in Big Bend National Park	p. 83
Even	p. 84
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

From Part One
OLD MAMA SATURDAY
("Saturday's Child Must Work for a Living.")

"I'm moving from Grief Street.
Taxes are high here
though the mortgage's cheap.

The house is well built.
With stuff to protect, that
mattered to me,
the security.

These things that I mind,
you know, aren't mine.
I mind minding them.
They weigh on my mind.

I don't mind them well.
I haven't got the knack
of kindly minding.
I say Take them back
but you never do.

When I throw them out
it may frighten you
and maybe me too.

       Maybe
it will empty me
too emptily

and keep me here
asleep, at sea
under the guilt quilt,
under the you tree."


NORTHAMPTON STYLE

Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,

as if it swam to time us down a river
where we dive and leave a single track
as evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer

that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

When we disentangle you are not with her
I am not with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer

still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer

and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

---

Excerpted from The Bird Catcher by Marie Ponsot
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.