Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles--an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

ALICE NOTLEY has published more than twenty collections of poems. Her Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.

Author's Note
from Love Poems
"2/? Saturday"
Friday Midnight Exactly
Cold Poem
I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year
from 165 Meeting House Lane




Dear Dark Continent
Incidentals in the Day World
Your Dailiness
But He Says I Misunderstood
from Songs for the Unborn Second Baby
from I
"Alice ordered me to be made"
The Virtue of Uncreatedness
Endless Day
30th Birthday
January
How Spring Comes
Little Egypt
Sonnet
A California Girlhood
Poem ("St. Mark's Place caught at night in hot summer,")
When I Was Alive
After Tsang Chih
Today
You
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
Untitled
"If she says that she's the goddess Fortune"
The World, All That Live & All That Occur
Bus Stop
Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice
The Locket
September's Book
A True Account of Talking to Judy Holiday, October 13
Poem ("You hear that heroic big land music?")
The Prophet
Desert for All of Music to Take Place
Untitled ("Clouds, big ones oh it's")
Flowers of the Foothills & Mountain Valleys
World's Bliss
Waltzing Matilda
Untitled ("All my life,")
Postcards
White Evening Primrose
Memorial Day
Margaret and Dusty
La Mort
Congratulating Wedge
The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books
So Much
Poem ("Why do I want to tell it")
Love
It Would
Weekend Weather
At Night the States
from Parts of a Wedding
"Corpus Sagrada"
"in this Paradise"
I the People
"in the dark I"
"More important than having been born is your city"
from Beginning with a Stain
"Beginning with a stain, as the Universe did perhaps"
"I will never not make a sound not have made a sound"
"Some people refuse to remember, & I"
"Against all agony a bunch of flowers in the chest"
"born in beauty born a loved one, before history"
"They say something ruinous & tragic happened soon after"
"Speaking firstly forever"
"You haven't saved me any time"
'What does she think?'
Homer's Art
Mother Mask
White Phosphorus
from The Descent of Alette - [from Book One]
"One day, I awoke" "& found myself on"
"There was a woman" "in a station"
"We couldn't find" "our fathers--"
"A mother" "& child"
"When I was born," "I was born now"
"I once" "found an exit"
"A car" "awash with blood"
"I stood again" "on the platform"
[from Book Three]
"'It's time to go,' he said" "'Go where?'"
"As I stared down" "into the black lake"
"The horizontal" "black void"
"Talons tore me," "tore my flesh"
"When I awoke I" "was in darkness"
"'We will be silent" "& wait'"
"I looked into the light" "directly"
from Close to Me & Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven)
"I have to . . . talk to you. I have to tell you . . ."
"I sit mute Nothing mutely"
"They gave me, it seemed to me, an Initiation"
"Why do we make"
"When I say to you--I, almost, transfer a shape"
"In eternity There is no story"
"I'm . . . interested in, what of me there is . . . here."
"I'm going to tell you . . . a story."
"I don't have to"
from Desamere - [from Amere and Desnos]
'I dream,' says dead desert Desnos"
"'See this piece of amber?' Amere says to Brother"
"Desnos says, 'I dream I don't die"
[from Desert Poems]



from Mysteries of Small Houses
Would Want to Be in My Wildlife
One of the Longest Times
As Good as Anything
Choosing Styles--1972
I Must Have Called and So He Comes
The Trouble with You Girls
Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980)
Mid-80's
Sept 17/Aug 29, '88
1992
Lady Poverty
from Disobedience
Circorpse
Help Me Corpus Sagrada
The Islanders Remember That There Are no Women and no Men
Red Fish
Enuma Elish
from Reason and Other Women
Amid These Words I Can Know
Parable of Christian
Moses and the Burning Bush
Jone Jonah
Leaves
Grave of Light
Where Leftover Misery Goes
from Benediction
City
Love
Iphigenia
from Alma, or The Dead Women
Radical Feminist
Beloved Earth Restrain Them
Discredited
Oath
And Who Is Crying
Cherokee
Decomposition
Ballad
from In the Pines

from Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
"There was power in that room. I saw"
"The ghoul-girl. There was one to care for"
"What she reports against you isn't"
"The city I founded I will found again"
"What were you doing when I thought you were dead"
"If you meet me here I was Lady"
"Walking away turns to look over shoulder"
"Black sequins compression"
"I stand here in whose eyes"
"Woman with antlers, deer-headed antlered woman"
"If there's change you put it into this sculpture's slot"
"Justice may appear in the"
"No world is intact"
List of Poems by Titles of First Publication
Index of Titles and First Lines
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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