The Watercourse; Poems
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. viii, 5, [9] pages. Slight DJ soiling. Cynthia Zarin (born 1959) is an American poet and journalist. She graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude, and Columbia University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Yale University. She has written for the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and is a contributing editor for Gourmet, and staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes frequently about books and theatre. Other works include libretti for two ballets for the New York based company BalletCollective, directed by Troy Schumacher, "The Impulse Wants Company" and "Dear and Blackbirds. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Grand Street, The Nation, and are widely anthologized. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Zarin's book consistently delights and instructs. Beginning with a "Spode Plate" and looking back to "Harriet" and forward to an "Heirloom", Zarin concentrates on the tiny, inarticulate moments of leisured life, where the pace of childhood stretches into adulthood, and "The Blue Moths," "Another Snowman" and "Michael's Boat" fill the days. There are moments of darkness and foreboding in poems like "Custody," but best are the verses of allegorical clarity. This book is firmly in the American light-verse tradition, where serious emotional business gets transacted under the cover of near rhymes. Fans of Zarin's fellow New Yorker poets Elizabeth Macklin and Grace Schulman will find Zarin has an even lighter touch, and will like her all the better for it. The polish and accessibility of this book, dedicated to the late Knopf editor Harry Ford, make it "old school" but not outmoded. The Watercourse won the Los Angeles Book Award. In her third book of poetry, her first in eight years, Cynthia Zarin, one of the finest poets of her generation, has turned her art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, Zarin, whose work has been compared to that of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, addresses the passage through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. At the book's center is a powerful sequence of love poems, in which she asks, Is it light on the trees / that turns them to pale fire / or is it spring, come without / warning to this town on / stilts . . . ? Whether taking a brood of children to the swimming pool, contemplating a parrot, or imagining a temperate landscape where Orion / could shoot the bear along the river, and miss, and miss, Zarin continually reveals beauty in subtle statements of feeling. Cynthia Zarin's new poems are as beautiful as anything being written today. Her work inherits the idiocyncratic civic poise of Marianne Moore's; a sense of bemused gratitude for the world's opulence gives Zarin's lines their characteristic shimmer, their warm obliquity. This third collection speaks with more sadness and simplicity than her earlier two; together the three volumes are a visionary achievement. The Watercourse is a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Poetry, Verse, Spode Plate, Harriet, Bruise, Astronomical Hen, Mrs. Donleavey, Envoy, Zoo, Winter, Santuario de Chimayo, Harlem, Christmas, Primrose, May Apple, Fury, Rotogravure, Deanery Parrot
ISBN: 0375413669
[Book #83311]
Price: $150.00