Blue Venus: Poems [Paperback]

Lisa Russ Spaar (Author)

Book Description

Series: Karen and Michael Braziller Books | Publication Date: October 20, 2004

In Blue Venus, Lisa Russ Spaar explores the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred. Her nocturnal poems weave themselves into the very fabric of private fervor--lyric, sexual, spiritual--beginning with "Dusk" and continuing on until "Dawn." Fierce and giving, Spaar's exquisite verse isolates essential moments of vulnerability and wonder. A series on insomnia--in the voices of some notable insomniacs--is among the most moving extended sequences in recent memory. Elsewhere, she traces poetry back to its primordial roots--prayer, lullabye, mourning, exaltation. Propelled throughout by a resolute belief in the relationship between the human and the cosmic Blue Venus is "a brilliant new star in poetry's firmament" (Carol Muske-Dukes).

Editorial Reviews

Review

Blue Venus is a thrilling tracing of what Blake called 'the lineaments of embodied desire.' -- Mark Doty

A virtuoso book, ambitiously beautiful...heightened lyricism, swelling music...but also a muscular, thrumming undercurrent reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

About the Author

Lisa Russ Spaar directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia. The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks and Glass Town, a full-length collection; and the editor of Acquainted with the Night, an anthology of poems about insomnia. Her poetry has appeared in many periodicals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Persea Books (October 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892553065
• ISBN-13: 978-0892553068
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #869,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An impressive anthology of original work, January 9, 2005

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Venus: Poems (Paperback)

Blue Venus is the newest poetry collection by Lisa Russ Spaar (winner of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women writers and Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing, University of Virginia) and one that continues the theme of insomnia by exploring the sleeplessness of such fascinating personalities as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Merton, the great hypnotist Mesmer, and others. An impressive anthology of original work, Spaar's poetry also reveals the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred, as well as other seemingly opposing or juxtaposing elements of the human experience. The Insomnia of Mesmer: In our afternoon sessions, lockets of magnetic light blur/the spines of firs in the private holiday of her induced sleep,//childish, her eyes widen, devoted to a glair/of inward, fabled knowledge I choreograph and keep//secret. At night, in the desolate hair shirt/of her absence, I own the lodestone of her weeping://it bespeaks the silence of her cloistered tongue--/a zone I cannot enter but whose passion I reap,//lured like geese honing off over the Danube, restlessly/obedient to laws chauvinistic and infidel--and deepening.