It Is Daylight (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Paperback]

Arda Collins (Author), Louise Gluck (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: April 7, 2009

Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Louise Glück's sixth pick as judge of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a debut both whimsical and dark. In limpid free verse lines that slink down the page, Collins introduces a speaker with little confidence in the self or the world at large, prone to questions like, Can I guess what I am thinking? Collins's poems seek an almost religious sense of meaning in a world too cynical for faith: God? you say, but not aloud. Since/ there is no god, you have to be/ both you and god. Yes, god says. When the poems rely on overly flat or jokey surrealism—He slaughtered a bear/ for a meat roast party—it's hard not to wonder why the poems won't admit to how seriously they take themselves and their subjects. Yet, at their best, these poems—set in places as understated as a zoo/ full of animals or a Heaven that is a white Formica table—are driven by a real, if vague, fear that will likely be a familiar poetic pose to readers who came of age in the last two decades, and which is really the old existential terror that the self can't really be known and that the terms of life are always shifting. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

The poems in this bracing collection, which won the 2008 Yale Younger Poets prize, often suggest aftermath. Collins drops hints of a past narrative—“It’s a shame / about adorable adults, / that they always seem like untrustworthy alcoholics”—but, within her stark tableaux, nothing is permitted to happen. The speaker, inevitably alone, is afraid of “seeing the refrigerator light go on,” and requires hours of strategic planning to sit down to a bowl of soup. She longs for an external calamity (a house burning down, say) to make her feel “included and ordinary.” This is the psyche as scorched earth: “Can I guess what I am thinking?” But Collins knows exactly what she’s doing, lulling us with a litany of the mundane (vacuuming, turkey burgers, Celine Dion) and then blindsiding us with the sublime.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300148887
• ISBN-13: 978-0300148886
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #592,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.