The Commandrine And Other Poems

by McSweeney, Joyelle

• ISBN13: 9780974090931
• ISBN10: 097409093X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-04
• Publisher: Univ Pr of New England

Summary

The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney's poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. Is she an earnest relator, using wit and gesture to tell the story faster? Or does she take the piss of her subjects, using perfected skills of mimicry and divination to exploit, spot on, their errant humanities? In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; "The Commandrine" is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their watery run-in with the Devil. "The Cockatoos Morose" stirs Eliotic grandeur with Stevensian absurdity for a cocktail of delirious observation and rigorous leaps of the sort McSweeney is certain to become famous for. "Crusade-dream flips like a standard. The standard / narrows to a point. And points. / Then it dips like a fern."

Author Biography

Joyelle McSweeney earned her BA from Harvard and holds an MPhil in English Studies from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Brief reviews of hers have appeared in The Boston Review and she is now a staff critic for The Constant Critic. She is a Professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Table of Contents

THE SIREN
The Siren	1	(1)
The Cockatoos Morose	2	(7)
Application Ballad	9	(1)
Youth Idiom	10	(5)
Click Track	15	(3)
Blue Suet	18	(1)
Bureau of	19	(1)
Lives	20	(7)
THE COMMANDRINE, A VERSE PLAY	27	(20)
JOAN
Joan	47	(1)
What I Eat is a Prayer	48	(2)
Bugs Bunny, Or, the Mirror that Hid a Little Camera	50	(1)
Battle Scene	51	(1)
Demos	52	(1)
The Wind Domes	53	(2)
The Air Sign	55	(1)
Initiation	56	(1)
Spectacular Attacks	57	(1)
The Born Fetus	58