Book
A treatise on stars / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780811229388
- ISBN: 0811229386
- Physical Description: 101 pages ; 20 cm
- Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : New Directions Books, 2020.
Content descriptions
| General Note: | "A New Directions book." |
| Summary, etc.: | "Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars extends the intensely phenomenological poetics of 'The Star Field' in Empathy, which appeared over thirty years ago. The book is structured as a continuous enfolding of poems, each made up of numbered serial parts, their presiding poetic consciousness moving from the desert arroyo of New Mexico to the white-tailed deer of Maine and between conversations with daughter, husband, friends, pets (corn snake and poodle), and a woman, or star-visitor, beneath a tree who calls 'any spirit in matter ... star-walking.' These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the channeling of daily experience, to gestalt and angel, dolphins and extraterrestrials. Here, family is a type of constellation and 'thought is a form of organized light.' All our senses are activated by Berssenbrugge's light absorbing lines, lines that map a geography of interconnected intelligence-interdimensional intelligence-that exists in all sentient objects and sustains us. This is not new age poetry but poetry for a new age, rigorous of thought and grounded in the physical world where 'days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.'"-- Provided by publisher. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | American poetry > 21st century. |
| Genre: | Poetry. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at GRPL.
Publishers Weekly Review
A Treatise on Stars
Publishers Weekly
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The 13 books from Berssenbrugge (Hello, the Roses) appear in this volume alongside Empathy, originally published in 1989. While the lines of her newest collection extend across the page, the poems in Empathy are broken into shorter lines, more traditional stanzas. For this poet, "love is a measurement," meaning the crossing of distance or time. But, as the poet writes in a note that opens the volume, while writing those poems, she was already in the process of developing a new voice influenced by John Ashbery and the West Coast "language poets." Some of those poems trace memories of China, where the poet lived as a child, while others evoke stunning New Mexico landscapes (she recalls time spent in a rustic adobe house without plumbing). These intriguing, beautiful, yet sometimes frustrating poems take shape as explanations that fail, again and again, to explain anything: "Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness, because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form." Lovers of the constellations and abstraction, however, will find themselves at home in the lyrical language. (Feb.)
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