The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter Gillian Cummings.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cummings, Gillian (Poet), author.

Series:

Colorado Prize for Poetry

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections (2018)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--21st century.

American poetry.

Genre:

Prose poems.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource.)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2018

Place of Publication:

Fort Collins, Colorado : The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, [2018]

Summary:

"In The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, Gillian Cummings gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till the outcome is deemed a suicide. Ophelia's story, spoken quietly, lyrically, in prose poems whose tone is unapologetically feminine, is bracketed in the first and third sections by short, whittled-down once-sonnets featuring other Ophelias, nameless "she" and "you" characters who address the question of madness and its aftermath. These women and girls want to know: what is God when the soul is at its nadir of suffering, and how can one have faith when living with a mind that wants to destroy itself? If it is true, as Joseph Campbell said, that "the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight," then Cummings strains the boundaries of this notion: "Is it the same? The desire to end a life/ and the need to know how: a flower's simple bliss?" Her women and girls, part "little heavenling" and part "small hellborn," understand the emptiness of utmost despair and long for that other emptiness which can be thought of as union with God, the death of the troublesome ego. Cummings' poetic ancestors may be Dickinson and Plath and her source here Shakespeare, but more contemporary voices also echo in her poems, those of Brock-Broido, Szporluk, and Cruz. Here, in The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, is what might happen if, after sealing off the doors and turning on the gas, indeed, after dying, a poet had come to embrace the holiness in how "all dissolves: one color,/one moon, all earth, red as love, red as living"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

A Note from the Final Judge

I

All of It Alive

Of the Notebooks Eyes

Of Water and Echo

Moon-Girls of the Burning Barn, 1

Moon-Girls of the Burning Barn, 2

Of Blossoms and Ghosts

Low to Ground and Listening

Here the Woods Come in Too Close

Of Bubbles and Milk

Flowers for the Executioner

A Matryoshka Doll Is a Nest Made of Eggs

Silence, a Prayer of Wax

Little Heavenling

Faint Stars of Dread

Memory of Sin

Unknowing the Clouds

Unwriting the Sentence

Of the Cloud In-Between

Song of Languor

Deaths Secrets like a Box

II

A toy in blood

I shall good lesson keep

The steep and thorny way

Vows of heaven

Pale as his shirt

So piteous and profound

Perfume lost

Could beauty

Like sweet bells jangled

A grass-green turf

The owl was a bakers daughter

III

A Dream of Sea Urchins

When World Is Whale

Moon-Girls of the Medicine

To Limn a Limbed Thing

They Break Open in Sun but Stay Dark

Portrait of a Storm

Of Thread and Absence

Of the Light Before Darkness

When the Shepherd Sleeps

Beech, Birch, Buckthorn

This Shade Wont Ink Why You Are Shy

Never Disparage a Moon-Girl, 1

Promise You Will Never Go Away

Never Disparage a Moon-Girl, 2

A Respite from the Ice

Colder the Arriving than What Arrives

No Tomorrows

In the Red Night Clouds

If Wings Neither Waxed nor Waned

IV

All my joy

Notes

Acknowledgements

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2018

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781885635662

1885635664

OCLC:

1043957458