Deep Light: New and Selected Poems, 1987--2007 [Paperback]

Rebecca McClanahan (Author), Robert B. Cumming (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 2007

Deep Light is not a poetry collection, if collection implies merely a gathering of similar objects. Nor is it a chronological compilation of work from the author s previous books. The poems in Deep Light have been selected and arranged to create a continuous, unified text. Like McClanahan s description of gray doves tipping across the gravel / their shadows pumping before them, the poems move forward in an alternating dance of light and shade. In the brightest places of our world, suggests this poet, grief and loss cast their shadows. But even in the darkest places, light makes its way.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rebecca McClanahan is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and teacher whose literary awards include the Wood prize from Poetry. Her most recent book, a suite of memoir-based essays entitled The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, won the 2005 Glasgow Award. She has also published four previous volumes of poetry and three books about the writing craft, including Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively. McClanahan s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, and numerous anthologies. She has received a Pushcart Prize in fiction, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in nonfiction, a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, and (twice) the Carter prize for the essay from Shenandoah. McClanahan, who lives in New York City, teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University in Charlotte, the Kenyon Review Writing Program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Iris Press (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0961078995
• ISBN-13: 978-0961078997
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,446,865 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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cherish this book!, February 23, 2008

By 

Allan G. Hunter (Watertown, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Deep Light (Hardcover)

Deep Light is a collection to own, to cherish, and to return to again and again. Rebecca McClanahan's word use is haunting - who else would call lungs `those meaty wings' - a phrase with all the power of startling freshness that simultaneously reminds us of our fleshly, frail, selves. And who but she could refer to making `anniversary love' - a coupling of words that conjures up occasions when love-making was celebratory and also, somehow, expected as part of the occasion?

Rebecca McClanahan's particular, gifts, for me, reach out from those two phrases. No one can evoke a sense of time and place as well as she does, with that added sense of time past and time present sliding over each other, like panes of glass, such that we see from level to level even as we're fixed in the present. Differing levels of time, or of reality, are handled with such deftness of touch that it's especially hard to write about them in a review without somehow doing violence to them. The sureness of tone in `To the Absent Wife of the Beautiful Poet at the Writer's Conference' is both humorous and evocative; its opening line a triumph of honesty and regret "I want you to know that nothing happened'. And that's the beauty of real poetry. The words take us beyond where words can normally reach.

Rebecca also has a great website with extracts of her poems and an audio of Garrison Keillor reading some of them. Check it out. But buy, and treasure, this collection.

Allan Hunter
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