Spar

Spar

by Karen Volkman
Spar

Spar

by Karen Volkman

eBook

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Overview

Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781587294167
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication date: 02/05/2002
Series: Iowa Poetry Prize , #1
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 72
File size: 484 KB

About the Author

Karen Volkman's first book, Crash's Law, was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, New Republic, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Fence. She is currently poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Create Desire I won’t go in today Shrewd star The problem of these ‘‘Why are you here’’ If it be event Meet me two years More feet on more May What, I said There Comes a time What we know Kiss Me Deadly O verb, o void Lady of the lake August could ask Yellow drapes Although the paths There was a stare And when the nights It could be a bird Poem (My hayseed harlequin) Or would triumph Octaves, ovations The first greeting I was watching Now I promise When kiss spells Betrayal He deciphers Tender feather Yes the red flower A story left I never wish to Dear noon Shadow of a Doubt The rain falls Winter Abstract A light says why O coronet The end of the day Implorers, connivers What I meet of And the urge is less Poem (Black corners of winter) I have a friend To take, to make Do not think, beloved Lost he says Heroic Roses No noise subtracts I believe there is We did things
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