Erotic Distance: Poems (New Odyssey Series) [Paperback]

Barbara Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003 | Series: New Odyssey Series

"Erotic Distance" explores our most intimate relationships and private lives in language that is at once painterly, sensual, and exacting. The poems combine the lyric image and formal rigor to negotiate the luminous space between ourselves and our desires.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Erotic Distance describes the unstable, but unquenchable connectedness of man, woman, and child. Once the head is lifted off the pillow the triangle begins to spin. Occasionally the angles soften into curves, into circle. The body rests and the song unburdens itself. The terms of entanglement are set among plain nouns--room, light, mirror, horse, birds, tree, apple, body--that describe the complexity of our interior geography. But autonomous space, in other words, 'sitting unopposed in the trees outside thinking,' is a privileged, impermanent position. The poems admit the losses only mercy can sustain and forgiveness relieve. The singing burns and yet the days open into one, 'Now, reach into the quiet for the name of the beloved/ Into the mouth of the apple.' Who can refuse this chastened exhortation to love. C. D. Wright Barbara Campbell is one of the best younger poets to appear in recent years. In its sensual understanding of states of anxiety, her work reminds me of the uncanny tone of Peter Handke novels, in which a leaf skitters down a highway or someone holds his hand in ice water for the texture of the experience. The heart is 'a fist of linen' and 'a red house comes in and out of focus for hours.' Formally diverse, the pastorals, ghazals, tyrannies, and aubades of Erotic Distance strike at the emotional center of experience--'They love and a field burns, circled by dogs'--with sympathy, and ardor. This is the poetry of desire and lyric intensity, complex in detail and ideation but also unbearably physical. --Paul Hoover

About the Author

Barbara Campbell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has published widely in journals including New American Writing, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, and most recently, Verse. Campbell was winner of the 1993 John Logan Poetry Prize and the 1990 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize, and has been awarded four residencies at the Ragdale Foundation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Truman State Univ Pr (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931112320
• ISBN-13: 978-1931112321
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,051,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Collection, August 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Erotic Distance: Poems (New Odyssey Series) (Paperback)

This is a beautiful collection of poems. I read the entire collection in one sitting and came away with the feeling of having experienced a journey from cloistration and seclusion to the discovery of love and faith. Each poem on its own is moving and Campbell is a true wordsmith, always tiptoeing up to the line of excess but somehow managing to keep her poems from becoming precious,overly private, or too erudite. The poet deftly navigates a series of 'tyrannies' or obstacles, and does so cleverly. Read together, the poems constitute a spectacular whole, as the reader has also navigated the various traps that the tyrannies present and has emerged, along with the poet, on the other side. _Erotic Distance_ is a fresh look at the peregrinations of the self in its search for the redemptive power of love.