House of Poured-Out Waters

by Mead, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780252069444
• ISBN10: 0252069447
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

"In House of Poured-Out Waters, Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency. More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future--but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational andlyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse."

Table of Contents

1
To Break the Spell is to Invite Chaos into the Universe	3	(1)
The Future	4	(1)
Rather	5	(1)
And All These Things Are So	6	(1)
Lack, the Owl	7	(1)
The World	8	(1)
But What If, as Is	9	(4)
Lack, the Memory	13	(2)
The Animal Messenger	15	(1)
Talking to You	16	(11)
2
Several Scenes in Search of the Same Explosion	27	(22)
3
Rather a Pale Occasion for Flowers	49	(3)
Point of Departure	52	(3)
Wind	55	(1)
What Happens	56	(1)
Lack, the Hummingbird	57	(1)
Incomplete Scenario Involving What the Voice Said	58	(2)
The Ring around the Reappearing Body	60	(3)
Problem Performed by Shadows	63	(4)
4
House of Poured-Out Waters	67	(26)
5
Notes toward a Definition	93	(6)
However	99	(1)
The Seventh Revelation of My Thirty-Seventh Year	100	(2)
Lack, the Willow	102	(3)
I Have Been Living	105	(1)
The Prairie as Valid Provider	106	(9)
Notes	115