In the Ice House

by Kaplan, Genevieve

• ISBN13: 9781597094627
• ISBN10: 1597094625
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-01
• Publisher: Red Hen Pr

Summary

Genevieve Kaplan's In the ice houseoffers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling ;at least the beginnings of some disaster ; taking place in a landscape that ;had no symmetry. ; Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as invoking Kaplan's own distinct poetic sensibility, these poems reveal an atmospheric and wondrous world filled with odd and compelling images. Readers confront the menace of the ordinary, ;the whale-faced spout of the drainpipe, the cluck / of the chicken-bird ; and how ;the light attacks / the window and the stress of the shining / does not ease. ; The poet's insistent evocation of elemental images-the birds, the ice, the water-becomes almost incantatory, as the speaker seeks escape from ;the frantic outside ; she's trapped within. Kaplan's sky ;has the depth / of an ocean, ; and this book deeply articulates how ;silence is the only word that can replace loss. ; Moving artfully between internal desires and incisive observations of the external, these stunning poems radiate with both heat and ice.

Excerpts

The landscape

Granted, the flowers will take hold,
what is yet rising will ease somehow. From here,

the light attacks
the window and the stress of the shining
does not ease.