Subterranean : poems / Jill Bialosky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bialosky, Jill.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

iv, 84 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2001.

Summary:

In the opening poem of this collection, Bialosky writes, "All I know is that she could not take it anymore/lying day after day underneath the hollow tree, waiting...wondering if there is a type of love/that saves us or whether there was more/to the world than the familiar paradise/of her mother's complicated and vivid garden." The poems that follow evoke, in Bialosky's frank, wistful style, the forms of love a woman indeed discovers outside that sheltering garden. She writes of the loss of one child and the birth of another; the passions of her previous life; the seductions of suicide and the comforts of art.

Woven throughout these poems are references to the story of Persephone and Demeter, and the speaker identifies with both -- Demeter as she grieves for her lost daughter; and Persephone, who dares to leave her mother for darker temptations. Bialosky manages, in this alluring book, to find a strange beauty in grief, and to emerge from those temptations significantly wiser.

Contents:

Subterranean 3

Flirtation 5

Terminal Tower 6

Torture 11

Interior with Child 21

Shadow Life 25

Four Versions of Rain 32

Mystery 39

The Wrath of the Gods 40

Music Lesson 42

The Fate of Persephone 44

The Circles, the Rings 48

The Adolescent Suicide 52

The Fall 54

Virgin Snow 56

A Dream of Winter 58

Raping the Nest 60

Temptation 61

Seven Seeds 63

Landscape with Child 67

The Swan 68

A World Foregone Though Not Yet Ended 69

History of Longing 70

Oracle 71

A Child Banishes the Darkness 72

In Search of the Sublime 73

The Aviary 75

The Boy Beheld His Mother's Past 76

Thanksgiving Primer 77

The Barbecue 79

The Arborist's Lament 80

Atonement 81

Pumpkin Picking 83.

ISBN:

0375413146

037570972X

OCLC:

46976437