With a Moon in Transit

by Jacqueline Osherow

• ISBN13: 9780802115997
• ISBN10: 0802115993
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1996-09-12
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

In With a Moon in Transit, Jacqueline Osherow has given us her most accomplished poetry to date. Integrating the strengths of her earlier work-humor, honesty, artifice, testimony-into compelling poems of great vigor and charm, she combines the often antithetical impulses of lyric and narrative verse. The result is an aesthetic largely her own, one that permits Osherow to treat emotionally charged events and elaborate ideas with remarkable control. Osherow's observations are by turns gossipy, grand, sober, and hilarious. She sustains a disarming tone and manages to assimilate elements of both high and popular culture without apparent strain. While firmly rooted in the Hebrew Bible, her verse is also informed by authors as various as Dante and Dickinson. Yet for all that these poems are alive to the literary past, they remain sensitive to the rhythms of conversation and the tones of everyday speech. Osherow's poems are composed with great clarity and rigor, but they never cease to sound casually spoken.

Author Biography

Jacqueline Osherow is an associate professor of English at the University of Utah.

Table of Contents

Late Night Tete-a-tete with a Moon in Transit	p. 3
Brief Encounter with a Hero, Name Unknown	p. 17
My Cousin Abe, Paul Antschel and Paul Celan	p. 19
On a City I Meant to Visit, Now at War	p. 22
Beijing Rids Itself of Sparrows	p. 25
Song for the Music in the Warsaw Ghetto	p. 27
London, Before and After: the Middle Way	p. 31
Calm Day at Couminole	p. 38
On My Third Daughter's First Night Home	p. 39
Villanelle for the Middle of the Night	p. 44
Early Spring, Back in London	p. 45
Dust on the Mantel: Sonnet	p. 55
Two Sonnets for the Wind in the Leaves	p. 56
Sonnet for a Single Day in Autumn	p. 58
On a Bus, Visiting Amherst from Salt Lake City	p. 59
Calling Emily Dickinson to Come, as Guide, Out West	p. 60
Summer Night: Flamenco	p. 64
Breezeway, circa 1964	p. 65
Sonnet about Last Night's Moon beneath the Clouds	p. 69
Full Moon over Salt Lake City: Seven-thirty A.M.	p. 70
Sonnet to the New Moon	p. 71
Terza Rima for a Sudden Change in Seasons	p. 72
Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy	p. 77
Moses in Paradise	p. 78
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