Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry) [Paperback]

Susan Kinsolving (Author), Richard Howard (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 18, 1999 | Series: Grove Press Poetry

“The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them.” — Susan Cheever

“Susan Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself — and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there.” — J. D. McClatchy

“What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving’s poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air.” — Anthony Hecht

“‘Things just are,’ Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision.” — Grace Schulman

“In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls ‘an oblique sublimity’ which is also the hallmark of her art.” — Edward Hirsch

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dailies and Rushes opens with the disappointment of a present not received: "And so / it's been in all my words and hopes: / poems, the elusive gift, the microscope." In the poems that follow, Susan Kinsolving holds a kind of microscope to the visible world, examining jellyfish, blossoms, animals, fruit. What she finds there, as often as not, is the self writ small: "We are collectors," the poem "Dried Butterflies" announces, "gathering information, artifacts / icons of identification / glass-cased or closet-closed." As poet, Kinsolving collects the artifacts of her own identity with an almost archaeological zeal. Through some extremely personal poems about divorce, death, and breakdown, Kinsolving retains both the wry distance of a scientist and the urgency of a prophet. Her keen ear is matched here only by her formal skill; in lines crammed full of wordplay and wit, she packs puns both verbal and visual as well as unobtrusive, sometimes off-kilter rhymes. "At the last, things grow precious," she tells us in "The Garden Green, The Garden Gone," her genuinely scary poem about the end of the world. Despite our claims of innocence, we've known the answers all along, she tells us, the knowledge "just a bit beyond, something / like the space Michelangelo made between / God's hand and Adam's." It's in this space that Kinsolving seeks to inscribe her poems--in the gap between inspiration and creation, knowledge and memory, self and other. We are all "ultimate divisions along a common stalk," as "The Dictionary Under Mountain Fringe" puts it, and it's this paradox that both animates these poems and saves them from tragedy. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving's debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot. In a familiar, no longer New York School blend of the quotidian and the quixotic, she takes on international politics, the violent death of a relative and the classic urgency of losing and finding love; and yet it is the occasional searing private moment, and not the thematic scope, that makes many of these poems shine. The best, like "The Jellyfish" or "The Night Nurse," strike to the heart of an ironic or Plath-like conundrum: "'These are your numbers,' she soothes. 'You must/ not refuse. The hospital provides them free/ of charge and we can insert them without leaving/ scars.'" Often it is the half-buried pun that satisfies here rather than her more overt word-play, and similarly, the poems frequently end with a ponderous last line that sometimes works, and sometimes comes off belabored: "I hear/ the closing door as it has never closed before." Kinsolving's tone can indeed be lofty, speaking of death as "the great weight of being," and the frequent repetitions are often ineffective, coming off more as unwieldly struggles than as artifice. But in her impressively stylized constructions and "more than meets the eye" depths (well explored in Richard Howard's rapt introduction) there remains a mutable, complex imagery ("The sick float past their bloodsteams into an evening of smooth lakes") giving even the more uneven pieces an ambivalent appeal.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (February 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802136052
• ISBN-13: 978-0802136053
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,122,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong Debut, May 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

Kinsolving's book is lovely. Although I wouldn't call her poems gripping, they are polished and beautifully restrained--at times, disturbing. Certainly not the typical first book of poems; I can see why it is getting so much attention.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, well-written debut., April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

This is simply a beautifully written collection of poems. It is listed as a first book, but Kinsolving writes with the grace and authority of a more established poet.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, beautiful book of poems., March 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dailies and Rushes: Poems (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

This is a wonderful, beautiful book of poems. I bought a copy a week ago, and now I'm buying copies as gifts for friends. This is a real poet who writes poems that help us give meaning to our place in the larger world. I've been thinking about these poems ever since I read them. Actually, I think the cover photograph (while is is artfully stunning) is a bit misleading. The poems are wise and mature and very thoughtful---not contemporary (in the bad sense of the word) but universal. Just lovely.