University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 eISBN: 978-0-8229-9122-9 | Paper: 978-0-8229-6139-0 Library of Congress Classification PS3573.O597B66 2011 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK “Susan Wood brings us this new collection of her poems and a steadfast intent to write with courage of history and contemporary American life. She is able—adept, even—to make things mundane seem complex and worthy of her pen while in due contrast illuminating things that could be considered justly grand as very human, tactile, and near. Like Jorie Graham or Geoffery Hill, she is swift and unapologetic about plunking her reader down in the middle of some landscape—as if the dear reader had been on holiday there with her all along—and provides details of her views of this place, making it familiar at once even if it screams unknown, remote, or exotic.”—Coal Hill Review
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Susan Wood is Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Bazaar and Campo Santo, which was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1991, and won the Natalie Ornish Prize of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her third book, Asunder, was chosen by Garrett Hongo for the National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
REVIEWS
“Sometimes your car breaks down in front of a gas station, and sometimes it doesn’t. Susan Wood works the lonely stretch of road that connects these two possibilities. It seems as though it’s always night in these beautiful, haunting poems, but Wood lights the landscape with her vision, her intelligence, and the fierceness of her love for everything human.”
—David Kirby
“The Book of Ten is Susan Wood’s fourth book of poems, and it is her best, which is saying something. If the truest poem is, at heart, an elegy, then the thirty-two examples here mark an advance in the capacity of poetry to work out and work through attitudes (perhaps beatitudes) of grief. It would be inadequate to read Wood’s new poems as simply beautiful lyric narratives—when they are totalities of feeling, moving between lament and wit with the skill of an imperative. Wood joins as much as she enjoins the reader to share in these victories of language over experience.”
—Stanley Plumly
“Susan Wood, as mature and unfrivolous a poet as we have today, has produced a collection that one might properly place in a line of literary descent from the confessional poets of the late ‘60s. She pirouettes around instance after episode of her soul’s trial, spinning elegant narratives and eloquent surmisals reminiscent of the best of English Romantic poetry.”
—Garrett Hongo
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
The Lord God Returns
Decalogue: Thin Ice
The Soul Bone
Decalogue: What If
Soledad
Decalogue: Rooms
I Got a Mind to Ramble
Decalogue: Husbands and Wives
Custody
In America
After His Retirement, LBJ Visits Greenville
“The Strange Case of the Virgin Lidwina”
A Short History of Women in the Nineteenth Century
Daily Life
If Grief Were a Bird
My Father Looks Down on Me
Benediction
Decalogue: Fathers and Daughters
Palace Theater
Dotage
Decalogue: Mothers and Daughters
The Old Testament
Decalogue: Mothers and Sons
The Magic Hour
Decalogue: Ethics
Horoscope
Without Number
Decalogue: Chance
My Mother Comes Back to Me
Decalogue: Siblings
Gratification
Elegy for My Pug Cosmo
Acknowledgments
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 eISBN: 978-0-8229-9122-9 Paper: 978-0-8229-6139-0
“Susan Wood brings us this new collection of her poems and a steadfast intent to write with courage of history and contemporary American life. She is able—adept, even—to make things mundane seem complex and worthy of her pen while in due contrast illuminating things that could be considered justly grand as very human, tactile, and near. Like Jorie Graham or Geoffery Hill, she is swift and unapologetic about plunking her reader down in the middle of some landscape—as if the dear reader had been on holiday there with her all along—and provides details of her views of this place, making it familiar at once even if it screams unknown, remote, or exotic.”—Coal Hill Review
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Susan Wood is Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Bazaar and Campo Santo, which was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1991, and won the Natalie Ornish Prize of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her third book, Asunder, was chosen by Garrett Hongo for the National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
REVIEWS
“Sometimes your car breaks down in front of a gas station, and sometimes it doesn’t. Susan Wood works the lonely stretch of road that connects these two possibilities. It seems as though it’s always night in these beautiful, haunting poems, but Wood lights the landscape with her vision, her intelligence, and the fierceness of her love for everything human.”
—David Kirby
“The Book of Ten is Susan Wood’s fourth book of poems, and it is her best, which is saying something. If the truest poem is, at heart, an elegy, then the thirty-two examples here mark an advance in the capacity of poetry to work out and work through attitudes (perhaps beatitudes) of grief. It would be inadequate to read Wood’s new poems as simply beautiful lyric narratives—when they are totalities of feeling, moving between lament and wit with the skill of an imperative. Wood joins as much as she enjoins the reader to share in these victories of language over experience.”
—Stanley Plumly
“Susan Wood, as mature and unfrivolous a poet as we have today, has produced a collection that one might properly place in a line of literary descent from the confessional poets of the late ‘60s. She pirouettes around instance after episode of her soul’s trial, spinning elegant narratives and eloquent surmisals reminiscent of the best of English Romantic poetry.”
—Garrett Hongo
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
The Lord God Returns
Decalogue: Thin Ice
The Soul Bone
Decalogue: What If
Soledad
Decalogue: Rooms
I Got a Mind to Ramble
Decalogue: Husbands and Wives
Custody
In America
After His Retirement, LBJ Visits Greenville
“The Strange Case of the Virgin Lidwina”
A Short History of Women in the Nineteenth Century
Daily Life
If Grief Were a Bird
My Father Looks Down on Me
Benediction
Decalogue: Fathers and Daughters
Palace Theater
Dotage
Decalogue: Mothers and Daughters
The Old Testament
Decalogue: Mothers and Sons
The Magic Hour
Decalogue: Ethics
Horoscope
Without Number
Decalogue: Chance
My Mother Comes Back to Me
Decalogue: Siblings
Gratification
Elegy for My Pug Cosmo
Acknowledgments
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE