Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014

by Linda Gregerson

Overview

In her first book of collected work, prize-winning poet Linda Gregerson mines nearly forty years of poetry, bringing us a full range of her talents.

Ten new poems introduce Prodigal, followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadly in subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson’s standing as “one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality” (Chicago Tribune).

A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet's intellect in the midst of her career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544301689
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Linda Gregerson is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

Read an Excerpt

Sostenuto 
 Night. Or what
 
         they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
   air, what was
 
in my lungs just an hour ago is now
      in yours,
         there’s only so much air to go
 
   around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,
 
      but nobody’s making more land.
            When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,
 
      they invented a game whose logic
   largely escaped me — 
         something to do with the
 
            disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks — until
   I asked them what they called it. They
 
      were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
   Keeping the ducks alive, I think,
 
         was what you were supposed to
            contrive, as long
   as you could make it last. Up here
 
   in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
         cubic feet of steerage we’re
      a long
 
   held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
      than human breath could manage. In
 
            the third age, says the story, they
   divided up the earth. And that was when
   the goddess turned away from them.
 
 
 
 from De Arte Honeste Amandi
How Love, When It Has Been Acquired, May Be Kept 
 
That was when the war was on, the one we felt good
to hate, so of course I thought he’d come from there.
It was June. The light grown long again.
She’d roll his chair to the window
 
and back. But no, you said, it was love.
They were getting it wrong.
A leg. A leg. An arm to the elbow.
Like the man who burned his daughter to get
 
good winds. The sea for days had been flat
as the sky. He’d walk while the light went down
and could only tell the water from the air by the drag
below his knees. So this is what it’s like
 
to have no body. A perfect benevolent temperature.
The wheels of the chariots grind
in the hulls of the ships. He lay so still he honeycombed,
may he be safe, may we be sound. The time
 
they bargained for came piece by piece.
 
 
 Indications That One’s Love Has Returned
 There’s an illness, of the sort that’s named for a man
who first imagines that disparate threads might be threads
on a loom, that is called his syndrome, and frightens
the weaver, who cannot unravel by night
 
what she sees in the day. Their table had the sun for hours.
The piazza was white. They talked
about physicians at home, whose stories were longer, if less
in accord. And about the morning months ago
 
when the color first spread beneath her eyes.
From cheekbone to cheekbone, the smallest vessels had burst
in a pattern called butterfly, they’d named that too,
as the tour guides name rocks till you can’t see the
         sandstone plain
 
anymore, but Witch’s Cauldron and Hornet’s Nest.
The wings went away. The course of the river that carved
         the rock
is air now, and baffles intent. She’d been used to a different notion
of course, the kind you might follow for love of the thing
 
or of knowledge, the wings in the glass.
 

Table of Contents

New Poems

Sostenuto 3

The Wrath of Juno 5

The Weavers 7

Font 9

The Dolphins 12

The Wrath of Juno 14

Heliotrope 16

Pythagorean 19

Ceres Lamenting 22

And Sometimes 26

From Fire in the Conservatory

From De Arte Honeste Amandi 33

Geometry 35

Maudlin; Or, the Magdalen's Tears 36

Wife 38

Much Missed 40

Fire in the Conservatory 42

"Halfe a Yard of Rede Sea" 44

From The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

The Bad Physician 49

For My Father, Who Would Rather Stay Home 52

Safe 57

An Arbor 61

Good News 65

For the Taking 69

The Resurrection of the Body 71

Bunting 74

Salt 80

Creation Myth 84

With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath 90

Target 92

Bleedthrough 98

The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep 103

From Waterborne

Eyes Like Leeks 111

Noah's Wife 114

Cord 117

Maculate 120

The Horses Run Back to Their Stalls 123

Waterborne 125

Pass Over 129

Narrow Flame 134

Grammatical Mood 135

From Magnetic North

Sweet 141

Bicameral 145

Make-Falcon 150

Bright Shadow 154

Father Mercy, Mother Tongue 156

At the Window 160

The Turning 162

My Father Comes Back from the Grave 166

Over Easy 170

Prodigal 173

Elegant 176

From The Selvage

The Selvage 183

Slight Tremor 185

Constitutional 186

Lately, I've taken to 188

Getting and Spending 191

Dido Refuses to Speak 195

From the Life of Saint Peter 204

Her Argument for the Existence of God 213

Still Life 215

Notes 223

Index of Titles and First Lines 227

Editorial Reviews

In 40 years of making her living on paper, Gregerson has composed a rangy intellectual poetry that draws on classical literature, the art of Renaissance Europe, modern American history and contemporary science. Nonetheless, she remains a storyteller at heart…Prodigal is the testament of an American stoic, with one foot in the Dust Bowl of her ancestors and the other firmly planted in modern theories of biological determinism. This eminently practical outlook might make for slow going, poetically speaking, if it weren't for Gregerson's literary discrimination and candor.

The New York Times Book Review - Srikanth Reddy

08/17/2015
For over four decades, Gregerson (The Selvage) has with compassion and intellect composed poems that wend through mythology, science, family narratives, and current events. Yet this volume is notable more for cohesion than change. Gregerson’s signature stepped lines call to mind the tercets of later W.C. Williams, but they are unmistakably her own. Uneven line lengths are steadied by immaculate prosody and consistent stanza structures; frequent pivots from line to line mete out progressions in thought as the poems travel down and across the page. Gregerson could be writing of her own lyric sensibility when she describes Athena and Arachne, who “with their earth-bread, grass-/ fed, kettle-dyed// wools, devised on their looms/ transitions so subtle no/ hand could trace nor eye discern/ their increments// yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.” A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy. Reading her work collected in this fashion, it becomes clear that a salient element of her poetics is the enduring commitment to thinking through suffering in its myriad forms and sources. Gregerson’s poems remind the reader “not unkindly, See,/ the world you have to live in is// the world that you have made.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice “The next time someone asks me what advantage poetry holds over prose, I will point to these lines, which move beyond the description of pain to its tangible embodiment…Gregerson attains what few contemporary poets even seek: a plausible 'we,' a basis for speaking across the lines of individual circumstance and social identity.”—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker "Dizzyingly ambitious and fiercely beautiful...The pleasures of such a retrospective are the pleasures of long acquaintance, and with Gregerson, those pleasures are both sensual and intellectual. The poems’ gorgeousness of sound and image is checked by a ferocious, sometimes acerbic, always morally demanding intelligence, at once plangent and analytic."—The Atlantic Online "Prodigal is the testament of an American stoic, with one foot in the Dust Bowl of her ancestors and the other firmly planted in modern theories of biological determinism...Amazing, Prodigal shows us, to think what we've amounted to, considering where we're from.”—Srikanth Reddy, New York Times Book Review "Prodigal by Linda Gregerson, tenderly considers a wide range of topics: personal, political, literary. The speaker’s clear vision and vast understanding are balanced by deep empathy. The 10 new poems draw from Roman mythology, pairing ancient wisdom with modern situations and concerns. That duality grounds the writing and provides wry insights into the desires of mortals, as in the second poem, 'The Wrath of Juno,' in which the goddess reflects on women’s longing for children and offhandedly mentions in vitro fertilization. The selected poems, from five earlier collections, create their own mythologies as Gregerson develops a style as distinctive for its jagged line lengths as for its compelling logic. Many poems feature deeply moving narratives about family traumas, loss and illness, the frailties of the body, and the longing for a divine presence. Some of the most affecting work focuses on children who’ve been abused by loved ones or who abuse themselves. In the title poem, the speaker describes a teenager whose skin 'was almost otherworldly, touch/ so silken it seemed another kind/ of sight.' Yet 'she takes/ her scissors to that perfect page.'"—Washington Post "Gregerson’s syntax will make your heart stop. These are radiant poems about all manner of chance and misfortune. Gregerson makes us realize all the suffering adjacent to us in daily life."—The New Yorker, "Twelve Books of Poems, About Poems, or Tangentially Related to Poems from 2015" “A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.”—Publishers Weekly "The breadth of poetic creativity in National Book Award finalist Gregerson’s grand compilation is beautiful in scope, elastic in space, and spectacularly aware and erudite. As she considers Roman gods, the limits of Earth, art, and politics, her use of delicate detail and experimental forms create a vibrant tapestry, while more ethereal subjects and language together coalesce into an introspective pattern of discovery. Ten brilliantly etched new poems followed by a hand-picked collection of 50 poems from her previous five collections, spanning from Firein the Conservatory (1982) to The Selvage (2012), make this one of the most important poetry volumes of the season."—Mark Eleveld, Booklist —

From the Publisher