A Daughter's Latitude: New & Selected Poems [Paperback]

Karen Swenson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1999

These selected poems of an award-winning poet and journalist re-enliven everyday events witnessed at home and abroad.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Old women ought to be explorers," writes Karen Swenson, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot in "A Daughter's Latitude." Swenson is no old woman, but exploration--as both physical experience and interior journey--lies at the heart of the 30 years' worth of poetry assembled here. As with Elizabeth Bishop, whose self-exile in Brazil deepened and matured her work, here travel forms a necessary companion to verse. And Swenson's travels are extensive; the book ought to come with a foldout map. Set in Southeast Asia, Native American reservations, and Brooklyn, it guides the reader through the darker side of American ambition. Her speakers have known personal tragedy and are attuned to the sorrows of others, as in the ominous and witty "Missionaries":

Jungle like green heads of broccoli--
the husbands helicopter over it
to the waiting front line of faith where
headmen squat on naked haunches
wearing necklaces of safety pins
while wives drink tea,
embroider, knit, or nurse a twelve-year-old
through quinine visions in late afternoon.

Swenson anticipates bad behavior from Westerners, whether in a remote Malaysian village or on the front porches of Fargo, North Dakota. Unfortunately, she's rarely disappointed. Swenson also writes for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and her work combines a journalist's attention to detail with a keen narrative intelligence and an unmistakable, lyrical voice. Well worth exploring. --Edward Skoog

Review

Adam And His Father
After Divorce
Akhmatova
Alien Women; Songkhla, Thailand
An American In Bangkok
Androgyny
Apollo At Lax
The Architect (1)
The Architect (2)
The Architect At The Edge Of The Sea
Background And Design
The Balinese Witch Doctor
Bare Feet
The Barmaid And The Alexandrite
The Beast
Billy
The Bracelet
The Cambodian Box
A Cappella
Chador
The Cham Towers At Da Nang
The Chinese Laundryman
City College
Closing Time At The San Diego Zoo
Cold Blood
Cold Hands Warm Heart
Collision
A Colonial Morning Dream
Come With Me Into Winter's Disheveled Grass
Cooper Square
The Daddy Strain
Dear Elizabeth:
The Death Of A Photographer
Deception Pass
Dexter Gordon: Copenhagen/avery Fisher Hall
Dinosaur National
The Diorama Painter At The Museum Of Natural History
Drifters: Bella Coola To Williams Lake
The English Graveyard In Malacca
Farewell To Fargo: Selling The House
Fisherman In Songkhla
The Floating Mormon
Forest Lawn
Four Windows
The Fun House Fable
The Garden Again
Gardens
Getting A Purchase
The Ghost
Good-bye Dorothy Gayle: Home To Fargo
Good-bye Dorothy Gayle: Over The Mackinac
Good-bye Dorothy Gayle: St. Cloud, Minnesota
Good-bye Dorothy Gayle: The Road To Buffalo
Grand Army Plaza
The Guide
Hatching
Henry Moore's Statue At Lincoln Center
The Heroines
The Highway Death Toll
Hooks And Eyes
Huffman's Photograph Of The Graves Of The Unknown At Little Bighorn
Hybrids Of War: A Morality Poem: 1. Vietnam
Hybrids Of War: A Morality Poem: 2. Cambodia
Hybrids Of War: A Morality Poem: 3. Thailalnd
Hybrids Of War: A Morality Poem: 4. The Moral
I Have Lost The Address Of My Country
The Ice-cream Sandwich
The Idaho Egg Woman
Impressions
Ishmael
Isn't It Romantic
The Itinerant Poet's Road Song
Johanna Pedersen
Josie Morris
Kathmandu Guest House
The Ladies Of Lewiston
The Landlady In Bangkok
Lennie Swenson
Like A Henry Moore Statue
Love In Black And White
The Love Poem
The Lovers
The Mad Woman's Song
Making The Bed
Manokwari, Irian Jaya
Market Women: Lake Toba
The Mask
Medias Res
Missionaries
The Moon
Moon Walk
Mother And Son
Moving
My Lai
My Mother Left Me
My Mother, 1930
New Neighborhood
Night Cry
No Exemption For Tourists
Nursing Home: The Canary
Nursing Home: The Doll
Nursing Home: The Visit
Office Party: Distaff View
On The Irt
One At Play In The Fields Of
Orangutan Rehab
Palouse
People Are
The Phosphorescent Man
Plato's Cave
Playing Jacks In Bhaktapur
Playing Someone Else's Piano
Pockets
Polygamy
The Portrait
The Price Of Women
A Problem In Aesthetics
The Quarrel
The Quilt
The Rand Mcnally Atlas
The Red Turtleneck
Revamping The Virgin
The Saga Of The Small-breasted Woman
Sarah's Monsters
The Seals In Penobscot Bay
Selling Her Engagement Ring
A Sense Of Direction
The Sere And Yellow Leaf
Signature Of Love
The Song Of The Mad Woman's Son
Sparrows
Spring Walk
Spring's Nebraska
Stalking Lemurs
The State Of Wyoming
The Stone
The Strapless
Surface And Structure: Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles
Survivors
Teh Lover
'that Kind Of Poem'
Three Silences In Thailand
Time And The Perfume River
Towers Of Simon Rodia
The Transience Of Hands
Trekking The Hills Of Northern Thailand
Tuol Sleng: Pol Pot's Prison
Two Trees In Kathmandu
The Viking Grave At Ladby
The Vireo
Virginia
We
Wedding Bed In Mangkutana
What Does A Woman Want?
The White Rabbit
Why Didn't Anyone Tell Hester Prynne?
Why?
Woman, Gallup, N.m.
Word Power
Wupatki
Yellow Coin
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; First Edition edition (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556590946
• ISBN-13: 978-1556590948
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,288,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars A well-tempered life's grace notes, March 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Daughter's Latitude: New & Selected Poems (Paperback)

The "sheets renewed for love or loneliness," are in a laundry but follow the poet back to her craft, where "I attempt to iron/ truisms shabby as the sheets of love/ or turn the frayed collar of a thought/ ... to make, one more time, the fabric hold." It's a telling and rare confession for a poet whose life and work are more often "adventures told with grace," more odyssey from Fargo, ND, to Nepal by way of Brooklyn, difficult parents and lovers, motherhood and cross-country travels solo, than pressing concerns of style. But her Utah highways, Perfume River in Vietnam, and view of two trees in Kathmandu, one full of egrets and the other hung with bats, are meditations as sure as Ignatian exercises. Occasionally the sibylline nods, turns oblique though often as not the reader is by then complicit in some guilty sensuality, some pleasure of the perfectly rendered particular. Swenson is the 1993 National Poetry Series winner for The Landlady in Bangkok. This book collects works from her four books and arranges them with previously uncollected poems in order, by decades, from the 60s through the 90s. The domestic and the foreign recur, as in a poem about her son at fifteen, whose other natural mother "roughs your lip with a sooty smudge,/ casts your features to her ambition,/ and molds you anew to her necessity,/ while your cheeks are still soft with my child." The captains of his soul, "Hook to Kirk to Ahab," mature, as, "Landlocked in my life,/ I wave a Quaker handkerchief from the dock,/ knowing the ship you set out in/ has no oars, leaks,/ is lost in space./ But sea and stars are still the same/ where wonder looms a white blindness." Which would be incomplete without words that shake from themselves the fleeting image of an accused in the dock, vagaries of sounds fitting misgivings past and future. This is the perspective and precision we should expect from anyone self-deprecatingly described in "us, the Sapphos,/ blue-stockinged office temporaries/ wearing our ink like eyeshadow.