Cold pastoral : poems / Rebecca Dunham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dunham, Rebecca, 1973- author.

Contributor:

James A. Crawford Memorial Fund.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Disasters--Poetry.

Disasters.

POETRY--American--General.

Local Subjects:

POETRY--American--General.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

70 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : Milkweed Editions, 2017.

Summary:

"A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways-unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time-and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources-poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where "I can't see the bugs; I don't hear the birds"--Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. "I owe him," she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, "must learn, at last, how to look." This is the world she shows us, without sentiment and with hard-earned beauty: Oysters decimated by freshwater release. Tarballs floating in the Gulf of Mexico. A hungry mother and her children in a grocery store. Clouds of pesticides. Eleven men dead. A silent spring. Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can-and, perhaps, should-be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Mnemosyne to the Poet 3

Elegy, Wind-Whipped 7

Atavism at Twilight 14

Black Horizon 15

In Which She Opens the Box 16

Elegy, Sung in Dirt 19

Mud 20

Field Note, 2011 22

Et in Arcadia Ego 23

Suburban Elegy 24

Field Note, 2011 25

Initial Exploration Report: Macondo Well 26

Blowout 29

To Walk on Air 31

Elegy for the Eleven 32

Daybreak 39

There Lies the Hydra 40

To Narcissus 43

Backyard Pastoral 45

In Which She Considers the Water 46

Elegy, a Catalogue 47

Field Note, 2011 50

Elegy Written in Oil 51

A Hive of Boxes 57.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the James A. Crawford Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Dunham, Rebecca, 1973- Cold pastoral.

ISBN:

9781571314789

1571314784

OCLC:

954430223