The watercourse : poems / Cynthia Zarin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zarin, Cynthia.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

viii, 75 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2002.

Summary:

In her third book, her first in eight years, Zarin turns her consummate art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, she makes her way through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. Whether escorting a brood of children to the swimming pool in the ninth month of pregnancy or contemplating a parrot or a bruise on her knee, Zarin reveals beauty in the working-out of subtle statements of feeling -- as in these lines about figure skating in Harlem on Christmas Day:

Folly tells the truth by what it's not -- one X equals a fall I'd not forgo. Are ice and fire the integers we've got?

Skating backwards tells another story -- the risky star above the freezing town, a way to walk on water and not drown.

Always attentive to the rash life of the heart, Zarin offers us a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection.

ISBN:

0375413669

0375709770

OCLC:

47221834