Departure: Poems [Paperback]

Rosanna Warren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2005

"An important poet...beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets."—Harold Bloom

Ancient and modern eras, sacred and earthly forces, personal and communal mourning are all held in the arc of this exquisite new collection. Named an Honor Book in the 2004 Massachusetts Book Awards, Departure celebrates the marriage of contraries in private poems of difficult love as Rosanna Warren explores intimacy and separation between mother and daughter, husband and wife, artist and muse, woman and demon lover.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Warren has worked extensively with translations (especially from Latin and Italian): in this fourth book of her own poetry (the first since 1993's much-honored Stained Glass), long and masterfully elaborate sentences and unrhymed stanzas follow the poet's eye and mind across the landscapes of Europe and New England. Yet her most powerful poems concern a mother's dementia and death: "`I told the daughter it was/ time to call in the Hospice.'// `I am "the daughter"?'" one poem recalls, concluding "So have whole tribes/ passed from the memory of earth." Warren follows this intensely personal work with two sequences based on other artists' lives. Though one (about the composer Leos Janacek) may not transcend its sources, the other, "From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine," becomes a delightfully odd and heartfelt experiment: "That's how we know a god, when the facts/ leap at the tenderest innards." (Warren describes Verveine as "an imaginary French poet" whom she has chosen to translate into English.) Warren concludes with well-made poems about travel and marital love: if some seem all too purely descriptive, others display insight and hidden discipline that recall the last poems of Robert Lowell: in an airplane, "On the wing, the paint/ blisters in gunmetal eczema"; in "Lake," a masterful page-long sentence recalls "the heaviness/ of your own seasons and of illnesses not your own."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Her fourth book and her strongest. -- Charles Simic, New York Review of Books

Throughout this work, Warren's images are evocative and original. -- Library Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393326810
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326819
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,274,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An imaginative landscape, June 8, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Departure: Poems (Hardcover)

In flashes of brilliance, Warren calls forth the image of a god, striding down a hillside "vomiting down/ its loosened jaw of scree." It is in such moments that changes are wrought, but often go unnoticed:

"any day, any ordinary hour, when all we see

is a peculiar, shivering brilliance in the air

like a premonition of migraine; and no one else can see

later, how in such a flash, the dark came there." (Arrival)

The word "mother" hovers frequently and cannot help but remind of another mother, brought to life on the pages:

"facing death, my

mother gripped the bedrails but still

stared straight ahead- and

who was it, finally,

who loosened

her hands?" (Simile)

The words of the poet are incredibly personal, as each line resonates, the shared thoughts brought together, filling the mind with possibilities, with connections and memories. The images evoked by Warren are larger than life, caught in the web of myth, yet made accessible to imagination. Ancient civilization meets the modern world, from archetype to the aching loss of a loved one, classical feet mired in feet of clay. Warren speaks with a singular voice, phrases that capture a moment for eternity: "It is enough, this moment, not to speak. To touch your hand." (Ecologue). Luan Gaines/2005.