Summary

Jill Bialosky follows her acclaimed debut collection,The End of Desire, with this powerful sequence of poems that probes the subterranean depths of eros. Gerald Stern has called Bialosky "the poet of the secret garden, the place, at once, of grace and sadness," and here she enters that garden again, blending the classical with the contemporary in bold considerations of desire, fertility, virginity, and childbirth. Written against the idealizations of romantic love and motherhood, she tells of the loss of one child and the birth of another, the fierce passions of life before children, the seductions of suicide, and the comforts of art. Throughout, she braids and unbraids the distinct yet often inseparable themes of motherhood, love, and sexuality. "When he comes to me," she writes, half-filled glass in his hand, wanting me to touch him, I hear you stir in your crib. I know what your body feels like. The soft skin of a flower, not bruised, not yet in torment . . . Subterraneanis the moving and intimate account of the emergence of a female psyche. Like the figures of Persephone and Demeter, who appear in various forms in these poems, Bialosky finds a strange beauty in grief, and emerges from the realms of temptation with insight and distinction. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Her first book, The End of Desire, was published by Knopf in 1997, and her poems appear regularly in journals such as Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Agni Review, and The New Republic. Bialosky is an editor at W. W. Norton and teaches at Columbia University; she lives in New York City with her husband and son. From the Hardcover edition.

Subterranean

(2)

Flirtation

(1)

Terminal Tower

(5)

Torture

(10)

Interior with Child

(4)

Shadow Life

(7)

Four Versions of Rain

(7)

III

Mystery

(1)

The Wrath of the Gods

(2)

Music Lesson

(2)

The Fate of Persephone

(4)

The Circles, the Rings

(4)

The Adolescent Suicide

(2)

The Fall

(2)

Virgin Snow

(2)

A Dream of Winter

(2)

Raping the Nest

(1)

Temptation

(2)

Seven Seeds

(4)

Landscape with Child

(1)

The Swan

(1)

A World Foregone Though Not Yet Ended

(1)

History of Longing

(1)

Oracle

(1)

A Child Banishes the Darkness

(1)

In Search of the Sublime

(2)

The Aviary

(1)

The Boy Beheld His Mother's Past

(1)

Thanksgiving Primer

(2)

The Barbecue

(1)

The Arborist's Lament

(1)

Atonement

(2)

Pumpkin Picking

(2)

Notes

(1)

Acknowledgments

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

A Child Banishes the Darkness

The child presides over our lives like the
Blinding presence of tall white pines. In the
Low room she hovers; she is the dark un-
tamed place, like a thicket in a neglect-
ed wood where I fall to after each new
loss, the unforgotten dream buried like
a small toy under layers of frozen
un-raked leaves. She is the hidden secret
we don’t talk about because there is noth-
ing left to say. So much snow on the roofs
of tall buildings, along the cobbled streets,
in the eaves, and on the narrow bridge and
in the quiet palm of the newborn trees.
Nothing left to fear. All the earth is calm.

Subterranean

She did not know when it would happen
or how it would overtake her
or whether she would allow herself.
All I know is that she could not take it anymore
lying day after day underneath the hollow tree, waiting,
consumed by a kind of fire,
wondering if there is a type of love
that saves us or whether there was more
to the world than the familiar paradise
of her mother's complicated and vivid garden.
She smelled nectar in the labored-over
chrysanthemum and amaryllis,
but could not taste it.
I know if it were a flower it would have bloomed
in the cumulus overhead
void of volition and sin,
translucent as the filmy underside of a leaf.
If it were an animal she would have followed it,
but it was amorphous as feeling, weightless as dust,
turbulent as an entire undisclosed universe
radiating from the inner core beneath the earth
and, still, she longed for it.
Restless, she wandered from the elm
to the school-yard to smother an intensity
she could not squelch or simmer.
The wind swooned. Cement cracked. Deep into the underbelly
light traveled, no one in sight but his immense shadow,
and then a figure appeared out of the imagined dream
and matched it. So powerful, not for who he was
but for how her mind had magnified him
like a bug underneath cool glass,
every antenna and tentacle aquiver.
No sign of where she had been
or who she came from. Only knowledge
that it would never be re-created
except by this: putting words down on a page
and that she had forever compromised
the joy of summer for a dismal, endless winter.
And as the field of force gathered,
raping every last silvery bough,
tantalizing each limb,
she forgot even the feel of herself.
When it was over she felt moisture. Rain.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Subterranean by Jill Bialosky
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.