Horizon Note

by Robin Behn

Overview

A son is born too early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life’s other horizon. In language dense and clear, playful and somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude suggestive of her own musical training, Behn traverses these horizons “extracting,” like the horizon note that drones through traditional Indian music, “a red needle from the sky.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299175306
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	09/25/2001
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series , #2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robin Behn is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Paper Bird and The Red Hour, and co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. She directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.

What People are Saying About This

Deborah Digges

The light off the poems in Horizon Note is blinding at times, proximity and vastness traversed, vectored, a flying without instruments, almost here, almost home. It's a book that trusts the elements. Behn finds the free-fall of her range, her mythic nature. Impeccably crafted, these poems feel like ladders made, like a violin or a piano, from many kinds of wood. In the new atmospheres Behn is singing or humming or playing or orchestrating silence. I'm riveted, alight, stunned at such music.

Editorial Reviews

"Horizon Note turns speech into music, even as it resists and questions the slippery, beloved, difficult stuff it's made of. Behn makes live, breathing art out of language’s terrible limitations, the paradoxical ways it both enables and betrays us."—Mark Doty, judge, 2001 Brittingham Prize in Poetry

From the Publisher