Eve [Paperback]

Annie Finch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1997

Though Eve may be seen as a symbol of the demonization of women, she shares many characteristics with the ancient mother-goddesses worldwide from whom her story derives. Like her predecessors, Eve brought both death and life to humanity. In some Judeo-Christian legends, she also persuaded God to allow humans to be resurrected.

Annie Finch's book of poems reveals an original and unforgettable poetic voice. Finch's poems have a mysterious, musical, and passionate elegance, the work of a highly skilled and innovative poet. The different genres in Eve include a lyric sequence on ancient goddesses, a literary parody, a protest poem, and an original myth.

Finch, whose work as a critic and anthologist is expanding the boundaries of new formalist poetry, presents a wide diversity of poems in this impressively crafted book. Her virtuosity encompasses traditional European and classical forms as well as accentual chant form and haunting falling rhythms. This collection heralds Annie Finch as a poet of grace as well as style, verve as well as form.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Although Eve may be seen as a symbol of the demonization of women, she shares many characteristics with the ancient mother-goddesses worldwide from whom her story derives. Like her predecessors, Eve brought both death and life to humanity. In some Judeo-Christian legends, she also persuaded God to allow humans to be resurrected. Annie Finch's poetry reveals an original and unforgettable poetic voice, one with a musical and passionate elegance. The different genres in Eve include a lyric sequence on ancient goddesses, a literary parody, a protest poem, and an original myth. When mother Eve took the first apple down/from the tree that grew where nature's heart had been/and came tumbling, circling, rosy, into sin/which goddesses were lost, and which were found?/What spirals moved in pity and unwound/across our mother's body with the spin/of planets lost for us and all her kin?/What serpents curved their mouths into a frown,/but left their bodies twined in us like threads/that lead us back to her? Her presence warms,/and if I follow closely through the maze,/it is to where her remembered reaching spreads/in branching gifts, it is to her reaching arms/that I look, as if for something near to praise. -- Midwest Book Review

Ancestor
Another Reluctance
Aphrodite
Being A Constellation
Brigid
Changng Woman
The Circled Sand
Coatlique
Courtship
Coy Mistress
Daughter
The Door
Driving Past Violets
Encounter
Eve
Frozen In
The Garden
Great Reading Room Murals
Gulf War And Child: A Curse
In Cities, Be Alert
Inanna
Insect
Inside The Violet
The Last Mermother
Lucid Waking
My Raptor
No Snake
Nut
Pearl
The Pitcher
Rain Birth
Rhiannon
Running In Church
Samhain
Sapphics For Patience
Spider Woman
Strangers
Thanksgiving
Three Generations Of Secrets
Tribute
Walk With Me
Westminster
The Wish For Eyes
Zaraf's Star
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Annie Finch's brilliance as a young poet lies in her view of the world as complex: her passionate examinations of family relationships, of family history, of the search to understand one's place in the world are underpinned by a syntax and a poetic design equally passionate and complex. This is a formidable first volume of poetry -- Molly Peacock

Finch's poems are wild. Her formal structures and vocabulary tie down an explosive vision of feminine power, aligned with fertility and earthiness.... When Finch steps outside herself, she looks back at the female body, her vehicle of connection to the originals of things, to fertility, "root of the live earth, live through my body. Sinking body, walk in me now." She calls herself away from the pity that might be in this darkness, through claims to the legacy of feminine power -- Hungry Mind Review, Fall, 1997

[Finch] provides us with a superb anthology of interesting and rewarding verse forms: sonnets, traditional and rebellious both; a villanelle; and several more arcane forms chosen for their appropriateness to the subject, such as the four-stress lines of Inanna, a Sumerian form for a Sumerian goddess.... [she] is often associated with the poets known as the new formalists, but she cheerfully and with great competence ignores several of their stated principles, such as avoidance of European cultural totems or adherence to a self-consciously American idiom -- The Washington Times, July 6, 1997

About the Author

Annie Finch is the author or editor of fifteen books of poetry, translation, and criticism, most recently Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams and The Body of Poetry. Her book of poetry Calendars was short-listed for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award and in 2009 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award. She lives in Maine where she directs Stonecoast, the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 66 pages
• Publisher: Story Line Press (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885266367
• ISBN-13: 978-1885266361
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,902,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Publishers Weekly, March 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Eve (Paperback)

Women's experiences, past and present, real or invented, fill the pages of this engrossing debut. Nine sequences of lyric poems are organized around ancient goddesses, including "Brigid," the divine ancestor of the ancient Celts; "Coatlique," the oldest pre-Columbian deity; "Nut," a goddess of AFrican and, later, Egyptian mythology; and "Aphrodite." The poet puts her own spin on the events of Genesis in the compelling "No Snake": "Inside my Eden I can find no snake. / There's not one I could look to and believe, obey and then be ruined by and leave / because of, bearing children and an ache." Finch, who co-edited A Formal Feeling Comes (1994), reinforces the power of her invention with musical and rhythmical lines, as in "Strangers": "She turned to gold and fell in love, / She danced life upside down. / She opened up her eyes again / and asked some strangers in." Among the formal structure employed in several of the poems is a Welsh form, the Awdl Gwyydd, and a four-beat accentual line, found in Sumerian poetry. "Coy Mistress" ("You've praised my eyes, forehead, breast; / You've all our lives to praise the rest") is a witty response to Marvell's "Coy Mistress." In clear, modulated language, Finch deftly captures the immanence of these figures and their stories and compares them to particular experiences of modern women.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars C.L. Rawlins, Bloomsbury Review, July 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Eve (Paperback)

Though noted as a scholar, Finch is a poet in her bones, and EVE is the most delightful and original poetry I've run across in years. . . . Besides a considerable knowledge of myth and poetic forms, Finch has a knowing way with sound. What she proves here is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, the equivalent of a whalebone corset, but is instead a bio-acoustic key to memory and emotion, which existed prior to the written word. And it still works. . . Finch strains not at all, taking to formal verse as her namesake bird takes to air. Again and again in this book, I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea, and sound spun out in a perfect braid. And Finch manages not in just a few poems, but throughout. Manages, hell. She ties it up in nine colors of ribbon and then dances on the tabletop. Throughout the book there are phrases that ring and images that haunt: "Gray nature, make a dusk of me,/ and let me keep my ties." I love that. Finch refreshes both the art of poetry and that of clear thinking. EVE is a stunning, serious achievement, and also great fun. So I'll recommend it in the highest, with bells, whistles, fireworks, and only one cautionary note. Once you start reading, it's hard to stop. So-remember to breathe.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry Flash, November 1998, March 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Eve (Paperback)

In the course of the less than four dozen pages of poetry in EVE, Annie Finch transforms herself into a hawk, a bell, a horse, a constellation, a cat, a snowflake, a coy mistress, an unspecified raptor, Salome, and a wing. Her shape-shifting may be more overtly metaphorical than that of the recently deceased Carlos Castaneda, but Finch's changes seem at least as signficant and deeply felt. Castaneda's metamorphoses served as passports to various self-discoveries. Finch's journey is toward an imagined paradise--toward the post-patriarchal possibilities of culture, language and human relationships, routed through the remnants of pre-patriarchal myths and folkways. Instead of peyote, Finch's chief mode of transportation (and transformation) is via incantational rhyme, imagery, and rhythms. The poems take an even greater variety of forms than the poet. In the poem "Tribute," FInch claims Emily Dickinson as her chief literary influence, and in the context of her EVE, a collection of poetry with central and conscious matrilineal themes, the reader might well assume that Dickinson is being inducted as an ancestor. "Her voice has vanished through my own," Finch audaciously claims, and it is to her great credit that a reader familiar with Dickinson will not feel that Finch suffers by this self-imposed comparison. Gnomic, lyrical, intricate and deft, Finch's poetry brings Dickinson's to mind even without "Tribute." If Finch's work rarely attains the oceanic amplitude of its model, it has a post-feminist jauntiness and a theoretical and cultural sweep unavailable to Dickinson. . . With this core of reverence for the past, more specifically, the marginalized, female past, there is a pointedness to the traditional, but subtly tweaked use of meter, utilizing an impressive variety of rhythms. In her book of criticism, The GHost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Michigan, 1993), Finch has made a case for non-iambic feet, trying to do for the much-maligned trochees and triple rhythms what Baskin and RObbins did for offbeat icecream flavors. . . and so it is intriguing, though not crucial to the enjoyment of EVE, to see Finch's brilliantly arcane theories put into practice here. . . Finch's generation of poets were not generally encouraged to explore the possibilities of form. Her impolitic choice was to use everything in the toolbox, and to learn to use it expertly. To debut with such maturity and accomplishment is rare. Here is a full-fledged poet, that literary culture will need to track and study in flight, and who any reader of poetry will want to enjoy.