Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment), this volume brings Anne Waldman’s work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a ‘time before birth.’
Praise for Anne Waldman:
"Waldman brings her wild, oracular voice to the environmental questions that currently bedevil us." —Booklist
From "Citadels Thel Leaves Ringing":
We got to Mars. We circle asteroids with a strange anticipation. We go interstellar. We like the sound of wormhole. Its magic. Thel without footprint, without trace, desiccated, desolate, nothing around, nugatory. Thel who talks with worm. Thel a figment in the mind of becoming-in-life, of potential, of not-becoming-yet in-mind, just got dreamed up, a proposal is Thel's gambit for one who would be cautious. Caution trumps curious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The inimitable Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy) takes an ethereal, meditative trip "Offworld" with Blake's character Thel, exploring the existential dilemma of whether to choose life in the face of suffering. Throughout, these long poems alternate between verse and prose, Eastern and Western philosophy, spiritual channeling and focused critique. The disembodied Thel goes by an array of monikers, including "the dulcet voice of God through the female," "she who sleeps on a swan's wing," and "the thirteenth fairy, wandering sister." With one foot in the otherworldly and another planted firmly in reality, Waldman artfully places Thel's quandary in the context of war, terrorism, police brutality, and the devastating consequences of capitalism. This is most evident in the final poem, "Endtime": "We have met the enemy and it is the psychotic karmic flow of our own blowback." The mystical features regularly, as when Waldman annotates the strange correspondence she receives, including a writer seeking a dreamed-of guru and another seeking absolution: "I have been wrong about you and William Carlos Williams, please forgive me." If there is a solution to Thel's dilemma, for Waldman it lies in protest and the powers of language, "a bigger poetry/ that paces like a panther, alone yet enormous."
