In the ice house

Genevieve Kaplan

Description

Genevieve Kaplan’s In the ice house offers 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.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781597091756
• Langue: English

Extrait

In the ice house

In the ice house poems by Genevieve Kaplan
 Red Hen Press | Pasadena, California 

In the ice house
Copyright © 2011 by Genevieve Kaplan
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design and layout by Kathrine Davidson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaplan, Genevieve.
In the ice house : poems / by Genevieve Kaplan. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59709-462-7
I. Title.
PS3611.A649I5 2011
811’.6—dc22
2011004171
The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs partially support Red Hen Press.
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
First Edition
Acknowledgements
Some of these poems were first published in the following journals and anthologies: Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry , Cimarron Review , Copper Nickel , Dorado , Front Porch , The Loudest Voice: Volume 1 , Mrs. Maybe , The Northwest Review , The One Three Eight , West Wind Review , Word for/Word , and Zoland Poetry . My sincere thanks to the editors.
The publication of this book was made possible by A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize, awarded in 2009 for the best, unpublished poetry collection by a woman.
Epigraph
  1. Cruelty in the new west, like cruelty in the old, begins at home (with the) misuse of lightbulbs, wedding rings, microwaves. There’s no telling.              County lines shift over time but we’re not so fragile. Quaint enough we’re allowed to be a part of it. Facing the musty window (fingerprints, creases, barbarism)—how many miss it?     2. The mirror in my mouth, I hope, won’t betray a thing.     3. There’s a danger in beauty, a net in the sea, a kite in the sky, a bird in the tree.  
In the Ice House
A pace that quickens as night goes on
  there’s much to be put away to restore the home’s capacity for solid reason of its stakes pressed deep into your decision never to leave and unload all in the mind where I can foresee it here is the ping and if I can’t stop it I’m skeptical who will make it home     the rain is louder here it reaches the roof at a pace that quickens as night goes on unencountered by the spatula, not squelched by a murmur dead laugh of next door: the moment striking is the one striking now in the jest in the wind near the sock on the tower that narrates the breeze up here, ad infinitum     gulps of the proposed frogs in the distance non-discriminatory moonlight brave-minded minnows coy dolphins, enticing imagining the instant when I can tell that our progress is different the bird feeder gone to ruin the tomatoes to their pots the home itself sinking slowly so the destruction is literal     quiet evening, here the break of the dish is the sound that resonates the rawness I lack, are we limited by it the gaze of the one alone and peering and pretending not to be there too, being seen, secret hum of your motors running the home the day long last reclining