Winner of the 2002 Fence Modern Poets Series, Selected and with a forward by Ann Lauterbach.
Winner of the 2002 Fence Modern Poets Series, Selected and with a forward by Ann Lauterbach.
“Taking her cues from folktale, legend, and fable, Elizabeth Robinson has reinvented the ‘uses of enchantment.’ Robinson calibrates the motion between fear, apprehension, and knowledge—comprehension at the crux of human imagining. She shows, with a minimalist's precision and a logician's attention to linguistic morphology, how the often bleak agenda of the real capitulates to the moral restitution of the true; how our need to tell stories enjambs faith and enlightenment. This is a work of uncanny persuasion.” –– Ann Lauterbach
“Taking her cues from folktale, legend, and fable, Elizabeth Robinson has reinvented the ‘uses of enchantment.’ Robinson calibrates the motion between fear, apprehension, and knowledge—comprehension at the crux of human imagining. She shows, with a minimalist's precision and a logician's attention to linguistic morphology, how the often bleak agenda of the real capitulates to the moral restitution of the true; how our need to tell stories enjambs faith and enlightenment. This is a work of uncanny persuasion.”—Ann Lauterbach
"What stays a marvel in this impeccable poet's writing is her determination to bridge between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves. She is in that way also a translator, reading what otherwise our 'realities' would mistake, cover with layers of distracting judgment or else altogether discard. I feel a securing confidence in her poems—as though she had given me her hand and now I can follow, safe in her own attention. She says 'A childhood memory:/the lawn's damp on the ankles//murmurs that 'this place, here'//is no longer a reliable utterance.' As in the old story 'Hansel and Gretel'—which she uses with such brilliance—we learn that the spell is to know that 'the bodies' alternative//to directions is//recognition and ceaselessness.' Our safety is here."—Robert Creeley
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FROM THE BOOK Field
A certain person
dug not the jaw
but the image of the jaw
from sod.
A certain sower
buries jaw
with seed.
Now the jaw
returns to its creature
in conflagration.
And certitude of earth
misdirects
the limited climate:
mouths fall with
rain and embed images.
Winner of the 2002 Fence Modern Poets Series, Selected and with a foreword by Ann Lauterbach.
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Elizabeth Robinson was educated at Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. Her previous books include IN THE SEQUENCE OF FALLING THINGS, BED OF LISTS, HOUSE MADE OF SILVER, and HARROW. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a National Poetry Series Winner for PURE DESCENT. Her work was included in THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY OF 2002. She co-edits EtherDome Press, 26 MAGAZINE, and Instance Press, and lives in Berkeley, California, with her family.
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