No Need of Sympathy

by Fleda Brown

Overview

No Need of Sympathy is an exceptionally wide-ranging poetry collection, touching on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and the natures of poetry and reality. These poems, the eighth collection by Fleda Brown, ask huge questions; they zero in like a microscope on what’s here, at hand. They are spoken with humility, great humor, curiosity, and a deep love of living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938160196
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/09/2013
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Fleda Brown’s memoir Driving With Dvorák was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her six collections of poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and have twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Brown's poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prize-winning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, and former poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

I

For, Or, Nor /6
The Purpose of Poetry /7
The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower / 9
Bird’s Eye View / 10
Sugar, Sugar / 11
My Father and Hemingway Go Fishing / 12
The Dead / 13
Pilgrims / 14
Roofers / 15
Chipmunk of a Rock / 16
Year of the Tent Caterpillars / 17


II

Hare’s Breath / 19
Dancing at Your Wedding / 20
The Heart Stops / 21
The Chinless Woman in the Smart Park Booth / 22
I Take the Boys Up the Eiffel Tower / 23
Note to My Sister from Notre Dame / 24
God, God / 26
The Puffball / 27

III

Reading About the Unsolved Murder at Good Hart, Michigan, 1968 /29
Child Labor / 30
Relationship Therapy / 31
Here, in Silence / 33
The Illustration / 35
Short History of Music / 36
Big Bang / 37
Memorial Day / 38
Michigan / 39

IV

Pointillism / 42
The Grandmother Sonnets
Josh, 15 / 43
Zach, 14 / 44
Jake, 11 / 45
Noah, 10 / 46
Max, 9 /47
Samantha, 9 / 48
Joie, 7 / 49
Rita, 6 / 50
Casey, 5 / 51
Abigail, 3 / 52
Ribcage Heart / 53
Worms / 54

V

Building a Cathedral / 56
Felled Tree / 58
Translation / 59
Venus de Milo / 60
Birdhouse/ 61
Talk Radio / 62
Fourteen Lines / 63
Photo of Us on the Cottage Front Porch / 64

Editorial Reviews

Washington Independent Review of Books 'February Exemplar'

"Brown’s poetry “reads the way a dream feels … There are so many wonderfully thoughtful – beautiful – pieces here: a collection of very personal sonnets to her grandchildren … homages to old family photos … remembering desperate, deceitful students … There are close to fifty poems here, and they all are simply wonderful …" -Library Thing

“This slender volume feels like a coffee table art book. It has that kind of weight. It’s images rise from each page gradually…” -The Broadkill Review

“In every move she makes, she works the extremes in poetry, to combine passive thoughts and active situations to create a polarizing tension of intellectual excitement. In poetry, our thinking comes first – then with Brown, come the complications and layers. Her brand is weaving disparate thought forms. Sylvia Plath called poetry ‘a tyrannical art.’ Brown is meticulous at it. For her, nothing but the best will do.” -Washington Independent Review of Books

“Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present.” -World Literature Today

"throughout this fine book, Brown sweeps a seine net through what might seem like only loosely-schooling facts of the world, but through each poem’s intelligent movement and construction, the vibrant connections emerge....Brown’s work insists that the poetry of the earth—that is to say, poetry itself—is ceasing never”-Miramar Poetry Journal

From the Publisher