A Table of Content: Poems

by Dorothea Tanning

Overview

The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning

Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,

giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,

"Fill me."

-from "End of the Day on Second"

Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974022
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) lived an extraordinary life as an artist and writer. She published two books of poetry, A Table of Content and Coming to That; two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World; and a novel, Chasm. In 2012, she died at the age of 101 at her home in New York City.

Table of Contents

I
	Are You?	3
	Aspects of Ice, Detail	5
	A Table of Content	6
	Awake at Fifteen	7
	Bridge, Moon, Professor, Shoes	8
	Camouflage	9
	Collage (La Femme 100 Tetes)	12
	Destinations	14
	End of the Day on Second	15
	Figure Approaching, Opposite	16
	Flea Market (Rainy Day)	18
	Fortune Cookies	19
	Graduation	20
II
	Heaven on Earth	23
	Il a Trouve la Mort	25
	Insomnia, my cousin	27
	It's Late in the Rue de Lille	28
	Landscape with Postmark	30
	Life of Crime: St. Julien le Pauvre	32
	Minor Incident at the Intersection	35
	9 table settings	36
	No Palms	37
	Occupied Musical Chairs	38
	Of Beatitude	40
	Of Flesh and Gold	42
	Orphanotrophium	43
III
	Pursued, I Ran into the Barn	47
	Raft	48
	Rain of Blood, Aix-en-Provence	50
	Reckless Words	52
	Reminders	53
	Report from the Field	54
	Rue Monge Narrated	55
	Secret	57
	Sequestrienne	58
	Sibylline	59
	Six Avian Perils	60
	Space Disarmed	64
	Strawberries	65
	Sybaris	67
IV
	The Triumph of Venus	71
	This Is a Recording	72
	Time Flew	73
	To Our Father Who Art	74
	To That Garden	75
	Tour Dynamics	76
	To Zeno	78
	Two City Mice	79
	Unfounded Certitudes	80
	Waverly and a Place	81
	Window Treatment	83

Editorial Reviews

Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope-angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!” —J. D. McClatchy

From the Publisher

Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope-angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!

J. D. McClatchy

This internationally known painter and sculptor's debut collection is a curious mix of numerous styles: confessionalism, Whitmanic declaration, a self-containment worthy of Merrill. The stance that speaks loudest is a straightforward, unmannered approach to the deconstruction of icons, references and symbols: "He told us, with the years, you will come/ to love the world./ And we sat there with our souls in our laps,/ and comforted them." Elsewhere, Tanning's methods draw on Surrealism; that is no surprise, given her lifelong dialogue with the movement in her painting and her marriage to Max Ernst. (A poem dedicated to M.E. refers to Ernst's La Femme 100 Tetes.) Her speaker's tone throughout is tinged with regret-at loss of opportunity, vitality, love-making the poems quieter at heart than some of their jagged surfaces first suggest. At moments of greatest directness, Tanning can dip into clich , as when noting that "In French death is feminine," or that Merce Cunningham's dancers make "5 barely believable/ bodies/ become/ 1 thought." But more often than not in this marvelous miscellany, she pulls it off; "Time Flew" describes the whole arc of affection in a moment of eye contact: "What they saw/ would have no end, both knew." (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Internationally acclaimed for her paintings and sculptures, Tanning has turned to writing late in life (she was born in 1910). First, there was her 2001 memoir, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, and now her wonderful poems. Like collages, softly surreal, delicately personal, but somehow perfectly right, these works paste together the tangible with what's not, drawing images from life, family, places, and ideas and showing what was and what could be: "As morning swallows dew, my shadow/ swallows what was left of morning ..../ Oh, we were primed like canvas." There is not a reckless moment in these poems; each word is a deliberate stroke, somehow perfectly right: "Slept dreams, they say, take just a few seconds/ no matter how long they are. Or how far// I walked on that bridge of spider silk/ with the moon beside me like a friend." Recommended for larger American poetry collections and for women's literature collections as well.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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