Muse

by Susan Aizenberg

Overview

Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and “ordinary” people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand “what love is” in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While “there is no other world than this one” for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809389292
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2002
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	986 KB

About the Author

Susan Aizenberg is the coeditor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru, which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in the Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments One White Cat and Notebook: A Still Life Two Contrast, Composition Nights Mutable as Water Revise Themselves into the Shape of Our Extravagant Past What It Is Cortland, 1970 Twenty-Five Years from Anywhere Like That Kiss For the Dark Girl Triptych: For Michael In the Frame Far Rockaway Debut: Late Lines for a Thirtieth Birthday The Uses of Metaphor Grand Street Against Romance Muse Three Three Poems for Judi The Life You Really Have Memory from Childhood Luminous Child Flying West Art Ode for My Son at Seventeen Half-Light: No Feeling Sometimes When You’re Asleep Heat Georgic on Waking L’Heure Bleue Grace Florigraphy Prayer Notes Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry

Editorial Reviews

How can art and life coexist? This is one of the big questions that Susan Aizenberg raises in the superbly crafted, deeply felt poems of Muse. From a beautiful elegy for the poet Lynda Hull to a brilliant sequence on Vivian Eliot, we are moved by narrative, delighted by the music of speech, and dazzled by glittering imagery. But ultimately Aizenberg forces us to confront disturbing questions about how the aesthetic can be reconciled with the ethical. She faces these questions unflinchingly. They are the heart of her enterprise. A real, three-dimensional human being emerges out of the phrasing, the images, and the thoughts of these memorable poems, shaped out of words but entangled in the gritty detail of ordinary life.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine



“Clearly Susan Aizenberg has chosen to serve the most demanding of the nine muses, Clio, the muse of history. Aizenberg honors her with rich and vital poems of personal history, elegy, and what could be called Lyrics of the Long Haul—poems of the middle years, poems which testify to the difficulties of grace and the precious arrival of wisdom. This is an elegant and sustained volume. More importantly, it is an instructive one.”—David Wojahn, author of The Falling Hour

From the Publisher