Blessings and Inclemencies

by Constance Merritt

Overview

Wrested from the coppery, keen claws of existential extremity, Blessings and Inclemencies, Constance Merritt’s second collection of poems, is conventional in its forms and radical in its reaching back to the ground of being and to the originality and immediacy of our first encounters with language. Forgoing the common hedge of irony, these poems, without apology, place their bets on elemental language, intentional grace, and tradition in all its fruitfulness and freight. By turns passionate and distant, these poems manage at once to ensnare and elude us, and in their urgent quest for clarity seldom fail to compel us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807132586
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Constance Merritt's poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and the New Yorker, among other publications. A Protocol for Touch, her first poetry collection, was the 1999 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry selection and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. Merritt lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

The poems of Merritt's second collection take on big ideas: "I've seen the world without us, and it lacked/ Nothing, but burned on fierce and beautiful." Merritt (A Protocol for Touch) grounds her generalities in powerful, gorgeous lyrical moments, and there is little of the irony that marks the work of many of her contemporaries. Merritt's speakers plainly search for something to hold onto, and it's not meaning: she notes that "sense does not make birdsong beautiful." She uses "the ear, that outward/ heart" as her guide-many of these poems rhyme, both subtly and obviously, and all show a careful attention to shape and rhythm. Even the collection as a whole is carefully sculpted, with five sequences creating an arc that begins and ends with speakers searching for "comfort" and "tenderness" amid a world "where/ daily the tongues of men murder even/ the sturdiest hearts." There are moment when Merritt's love of rhyme leads to either antiquated ("Lest sober elders hear and come to chide") or worn-out phrases ("the fabric of a life"), and some readers may be put off by her tendency to lean on the Greek myths at times. Still, the heights achieved in the best of these poems are undeniable. (Oct.)

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