The Corpse Flower: New And Selected Poems (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Bruce Beasley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pacific Northwest Poetry Series | Publication Date: January 30, 2007

"The Corpse Flower" brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title: an enormous tropical bloom that reeks like carrion, and around whose three-day florescence 'dung beetles & flies & sweat bees swarm/pollen gummed all over/their furred feet'. The corpse flower serves as a figure for Beasley's coming to terms with birth and death, fecundity and decay, the illusion of death, and the flourishing of the rare and beautiful out of the materials of the decayed. "The Corpse Flower" traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit.Beasley's is a deeply physical spirituality - as he writes in one poem, 'the soul's/impossible to tell/from the objects of its appetite'. Throughout these poems, family mythology, as well as religious and mythic narrative and iconography, become occasions for extraordinary meditations on the physicality of birth and death, beginnings and endings. This substantial selection of Bruce Beasley's work, written over a twenty year period, offers the opportunity to experience, page by page, a poet's evolution, and to follow a unique, creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution - a resolution increasingly represented by the beauties of language itself.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bruce Beasley is professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is the author of five previous books including Spirituals and Signs and Abominations. Among his awards and honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, two Pushcart Prizes, the 1996 Colorado Prize (chosen by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia, the Ohio State University Press / Journal Award for The Creation, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia Press for Lord Brain. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295986395
• ISBN-13: 978-0295986395
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 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: #1,918,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars science, faith, monstrosity, and poetry, August 10, 2011

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Evan J. Peterson (Temple Laboratories) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Corpse Flower: New And Selected Poems (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Bruce Beasley ranks in my top five living poets. This collection is an excellent feast from his previous books, accompanied by ever-progressive new work. The title poem gives me chills with its eeriness. Eeriness is one of Beasley's many talents.

Keep in mind, Beasley writes about nature, science, and religion in a highly specialized vocabulary, so this may be daunting to the uninitiated. Personally, I actually enjoy being hit with a barrage of words I don't know. Not all of his poems are like this, but there are plenty of new words to look up and savor.

If you love poetry about the connections between the spiritual, the natural, and the scientific, bordering on the horrifying, I strongly, strongly recommend this book.