What you hear in the dark : new and selected poems / Sonia Gernes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gernes, Sonia.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

xi, 169 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, [2006]

Summary:

What You Hear in the Dark gathers the best of Sonia Gernes's previous poetry and adds three sections of new poems that give lyric voice to the thoughts and questions that surface in the midnight hours: the value of the lives we've chosen, time and mortality, the struggles with belief. In poems from Brief Lives, Gernes writes of survival and longing on a flat and fertile earth; in Women at Forty, of the resiliency and beauty of mid-life women; and in A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor, of a young woman thrust into teaching at a Minnesota Indian School in 1930, and a pioneer woman undone by Australia's forbidding terrain. As Miller Williams says of her work, it "has returned poetry to its first purpose [the telling of tales] with grace and wit."

The new poems confront the metaphysical directly and in a mature voice, searching through quotidian experience for "the ultimate equation / the voice beyond sound / the is beyond our stories of it / the X that equals God." Whether about her mother's long descent into Alzheimer's or the mystical urges of a nineteenth-century ancestor, these are luminous poems, shot through with delight in the natural world and with Gernes's hope that "even among / inconstant stars, our world revolves eastward / darkness ever spinning toward the light."

Contents:

New Poems

I Unnaming the Flowers

Flyboys 4

Sight Is a Species of Touch 6

The Houses of Ill Repute 8

The Bank 9

Ladyslipper 10

Golden 11

Traps 12

Geographer 13

Alzheimer's: The Early Years 15

A Chair, a Table, a Yellow Balloon 17

Unnaming the Flowers 18

II What You Hear in the Dark

What You Heart in the Dark 20

Headache 21

Rings 23

The Woman Who Spoke in Numbers 24

The Birds in Home Depot 25

Jazz 26

Fleurs d'Hiver 27

Poem in Wartime 28

III The X that Equals God

The First Year of Living Alone 32

The Church Burning 33

Iris 35

The Glazier's Daughter 36

The Pyramid at Cholula 37

Selected Poems

from Brief Lives (1981)

Elizabeth 42

That Piece of Earth 45

Rope Enough 48

Back Home in Indiana 51

Plainsong for an Ordinary Night 53

Auction 55

Two Letters 57

Margins of the Map 60

Moon for My Grandmother's Grand'mere 63

Entrance Day 64

The Bats 66

For the P.O.W. in My English Class 67

Practicing 68

Four Novembers: An Aviary 69

To Speak a Word of Grief 71

What I Did This Summer 73

To Close a House 75

from Women at Forty (1988)

Women at Forty 78

The Picture Bride 79

First Notice 81

Artifacts 83

Beneath Annie's Gown 85

This Lesson 87

Possum 88

Taps 90

Getting through Sundays 91

Letter to an Insomniac 92

Family History 94

Little Sisters 95

Dust 97

The New Appliances 99

The Many Kinds of Doubt 101

Things Come in from the Cold 103

Playing the Bells 104

Geese Crossing the Road 105

Ice Climber 106

The Momment of Loss Is Always Familiar 107

What If a Woman 108

Different Stars 109

A Legend 111

Wellington 113

Photographs: North Island 114

Photographs: South Island 117

Another Journal: New Zealand, 1895 120

Waitomo: The River under the Earth 122

from A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor (1997)

Selections from The Indian School

1 Home Economics 129

2 Civilization 130

6 Influenza 131

10 Pipestone 133

14 Spheres 135

18 Midnight 137

21 Assembly: The Man from Antarctica 138

26 Release 140

32 Calumet 142

Selections from A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor

Asylum 1883-1916: Margaret 146

Asylum 1993: Sonia 162.

ISBN:

0268029687

OCLC:

63108447

Publisher Number:

9780268029685