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Driven to Abstraction
Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as it passes. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodies on the way to vast projects of war.--Rosmarie Waldrop
Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop's sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, "Sway-Backed Powerlines," consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop's most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.
Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop's sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, "Sway-Backed Powerlines," consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop's most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.
Book Details
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: Nov 30th, 2010
- Pages: 144
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 0.40in - 0.45lb
- EAN: 9780811218795
- Categories: • American - General
About the Author
Waldrop, Rosmarie: - Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Praise for this book
One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry.-- "Boston Review"
Rosmarie Waldrop should be recognized as a national treasure.-- "The Providence Journal"
Rosmarie Waldrop is one of America's finest formalists. She is a poet capable of very direct address, of narrative when she wants it, of pointed humor, and of profound pathos. But her process of syntactic expropriation provides the open latticework across which her stunning lyrics creep.-- "No: A Journal of the Arts"