Sparrow

by Carol Muske-Dukes

Overview

Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the reader into a mesmerizing world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the questions that undergird all of art, all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the image of the sparrow, flitting from Catullus to the contemporary lyric.

Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of poetry and acting, the marriage of two artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be, in this profound elegiac collection, one of today’s finest living poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307491190
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/12/2008
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Carol Muske-Dukes is the founder and director of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her last collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and she has been the recipient of many awards, among them a Guggenheim fellowship. She has written three novels, and Married to the Icepick Killer, a collection of essays on Hollywood and poetry published in 2002, is her most recent book. She writes a regular column for the Los Angeles Times Book Review called “Poets’ Corner” and reviews for The New York Times. Muske-Dukes lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.

Read an Excerpt

VALENTINE'S DAY, 2003
 
By the heart, the heart is shaped for use.
Sweet Valentine, think on thy Proteus.
 
Heart and shaper of the heart.
One a swift violent muscle,
the other pure impetus: digitalis
 
of metaphor setting the changing
pace. Steady waves on the hospital chart
        or a spin in Death's speedboat—
 
Consider the dangerous white wake
                  in which we surface.
Wish me partake in thy happiness
When thou dost meet good hap
 
The first plane flies into the building.
The second into the heart's history.
And in thy danger
If ever danger do environ thee
 
Your death and the world's dying
seem, to me, one. Bomb strapped on
the chest, left side. A man stepping off a lit deck
 
into singing air.
 
Commend thy grievance to my holy prayers
For I was the one you loved
 
though each act of terror took away
the perspective of measured breath.
 
For I will be thy beadsman, Valentine
Beadsman now and this beating heart—
as the speedboat turns back across its own churning wake.
Terror and love, word & gesture, our hap. This sweet awful day.
 
This valentine.
 
Ionic
 
—after Cavafy
 
That their statues are broken,
that their temples are empty
doesn't mean that they are dead, the gods.
 
The gods never die—but memory
clears itself like the sky over Ionia—
Ionia the dream that is always forgotten
at dawn. The eyes of the god, the upturned
 
eyes, take in everything, nothing escapes
that gaze—then it is all enveloped in fire,
invisible fire of waking, the shudder of
returning consciousness, the lit blades.
 
But once I caught the winged figure, indistinct,
ascending. I saw him turn back and stare at me,
not able to erase what he knew I'd seen. His eyes
implicated in the loss, sudden pathos—then disappearance
over the bright hills.
 
WAITING FOR
 
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?
You asked, because you were Vladimir
And it was your turn to speak, to cry out
Astride the grave, a difficult birth …
 
Then I was terrified of you and your
transient's heart, your hat pulled down
to your eyes, bewhiskered, old—your
gaze young, demented, blue. It occurred
 
to me that we'd never come to a crossroads.
Or we'd always come to a crossroads. The
two tramps were waiting, but we never
waited for each other. Habit is a great
 
deadener, Vladimir said, but we never
lived with habit. You sat up in bed,
you howled as I philosophized, your face alight.
Leaves fell upward. We laughed, weightless,
 
pulled down by gravity. Each day was unlike
the others. For years at a time, years at
a time, remember? Or not.
Nothing in our lives was ever usual.
 

Editorial Reviews

Muske-Duke's fondness for classical allusions and verse forms -- potential pitfalls for pretension when writing about a Hollywood life -- render her elegies bolder and less florid in the elegance of the poems' direct speech. — Ken Tucker

The New York Times

Dedicated to her late husband, the actor David Dukes, Muske-Dukes's seventh collection of poems follows Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood (a collection of critical and autobiographical essays) and the novel Life After Death, and is devoted to poems of mourning. As with Donald Hall's Without or Ted Hughes's The Birthday Letters, the poems can vary widely in quality, and are best read as if constantly moving between verse memoir and poetry, with real people standing behind the poems' personae. And that is particularly apt here, as many of the poems knowingly engage Dukes's profession-"You give me up/ You go away/ You walk on a stage/ and are re-made." Coming almost exclusively in quatrains, tercets and distichs, these 43 short lyrics are suffused with remembrances of daily married life, of "[h]ow we ate together, slept together, sank/ into the distraction of distraction. Twenty years." Longing and grief produce concentrated moments of terse, wry observations on grief ("Death was a critic, like me./ Death could never be the actor-"; "everyone, Catullus,// I mean everyone, tells her to shut the fuck up") and grasped-for metaphor: "the shadow of the parachute of/ my desire, this rip-cord of your photo-/ blink." The best poems capture the darkly ambiguous ruminations of a partner left behind, with an imagination has been turned upside down. In "A Private Matter" the speaker flits through the characters her husband still embodies in video images, but can't quite insert herself: "Serge cries, `Red Seneca!' Laura is alone/ in the space station, weeping. I am not weeping./ I am emptying my pockets of my own monologues." It is a process that, often enough, readers will find tensely drawn and heartbreaking. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly