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Rift: Poems

by Barbara Helfgott Hyett

University of Arkansas Press, 2008
Paper: 978-1-55728-865-3 | eISBN: 978-1-61075-347-0
Library of Congress Classification PS3558.E4744R54 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Barbara Helfgott Hyett's new collection considers, from close and afar, the elemental forces coming to bear on human character in our time. In one sense a personal explication of a long marriage and its betrayal, these stunning poems take solace in nature's steadfastness, and in the prospect of a newly resilient self, awakened to the predicament of a battered world. The title poem spills across the face of history—9/11, Hiroshima, the harrowing geological formation of earth, the sudden appearance of cave art, and ultimately, the uncertainty of God. The Daphne and Apollo sequence invents fourteen speakers, including a chisel, a river god, the sculptor, Bernini, and the poet, Ovid, each telling his own story as together they deconstruct the longstanding myth of lust gone awry. Such is the imaginative, kaleidoscopic process of Rift, in which acts of observation shatter and shift our view of experience. While we ache for the loss in these poems, Helfgott Hyett risks such honest grief that redemption comes, free standing and moral, on its own.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Helfgott Hyett is a cofounder of the Writer's Room of Boston and is currently the director of POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets. She has taught at Boston University, MIT, and Harvard University. The author of four collections of poetry including The Tracks We Leave, Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, and The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus, she has worked as a visiting poet in schools all over Massachusetts. Her programs with students, teachers, and families include reading and writing workshops in childhood memory, parenting, and watchfulness.

REVIEWS

“Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s poems reflect both her anguish and her fervor; their warmth elevates the reader to spiritual heights.” —Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and author of Night “Helfgott Hyett’s poems about love, infidelity and the body in all its guises are tough, tender, and juicy.” —Maxine Kumin, author of Still to Mow, Poems “Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Rift is a book born of acute psychic necessity and there is not a trifle or bauble in it. . . . Faced with the annihilation of the life she has known, Helfgott Hyett employs her imagination, her learning, and her poetic virtuosity to search among biblical and mythic narratives, arctic expeditions, memories, meteor showers, classical and romantic art, and history for a way forward. This book is that way, a profound gift to all of us. The title sequence is itself a major work, a rich, polyvocal, unflinching vision of the world we live in now." —Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House, Without Paradise, and Gold Star Road “Helfgott Hyett takes up the theme of loss, specifically the break-up of a long marriage, in poems that are direct and detailed, with a power rooted in restraint and compression. Her imagery is clear and often surprising, as in these opening lines: ‘He rises slowly, so as/ not to wake her. An ox is/ that careful as it tears the grasses . . . ’ She captures each moment with precision, her ear for dialogue unerring, as in these lines: ‘She lay her face on his thighs./ . . . He patted her hair/ . . . Poor you, he told the top of her head./His boat shoes were tapping/the cabinet. It was all/he could do not to run.’ These poems, wrung from grief, anger, and disillusionment, return again and again to an affirmation of the hard work of living." —Ellen Bass, author of Courage to Heal and The Human Line

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
One: The Ring
From Their Bed	000
Whose	000
The Children	000
His Gifts	000
The Talk They Give on Marriage	000
Mrs. Noah	000	
Vacation	000
In Bed, Reading Moby-Dick	000
Assuming Happiness	000
Black Sock	000
Fists	000
Considering Killing Him Instead	000
Ash	000
Noah	000
Hex	000
Life List	000
Hadassah Bargain Spot	000
The Blows	000
Resolve	000
Haywire	000
In the Ring of Twenty Signs	000
Two: Apollo & Daphne
Bernini Explains	000
The Chisel	000
Daphne	000	
Apollo	000
Ovid	000
River God Father 	000
The Laurel	000	
Sculptor's Apprentice	000
Tour Guide	000
Woman with a Notebook	000
Two Figures	000
Three: The Flesh
Taking the River	000
Bravado	000
Men	000
The Arctic Imagined	000
Hunger	000
Shameless	000	
Sisyphus	000
Late Love	000
Myth	000	
Be Careful, a Man is Breathing	000
Bodily	000
On the Train to Rome	000
Harbor	000
This Morning	000
Kittens	000
Sons	000	
The Straits of Mating	000
Four: Dura Mater
Hall's Pond	000
Consoling My Friend after Her Death	000
On Earth	66
After the Suicide of a Friend	000	
Monarchs at Pismo Beach	000
The Origin of Armies	000
Rift	000
The Barrens	000
Small Boat	000
Even After	000

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