Five Terraces [Paperback]

Ann Fisher-Wirth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005

Fisher-Wirth's second full-length collection of poetry. She has been described stylistically as realist and a modernist who writes with intelligence and passion.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Splendor. Ardor. Surrender. Ann Fisher-Wirth's poems are so alive in their artistry, so exploding with surprise, so lyric in their knowledge of bidden and forbidden loves, so open to the breath of the natural world and to the perfume of theater and mask--I'm dazzled and overjoyed by this book. The two extended sequences, "Walking Wu Wei's Scroll" and "The Trinket Poems," are in utter contrast to each other except that both are breathtaking." ---Alicia Ostriker

"Every poem Ann Fisher-Wirth writes is a sort of love poem, a love poem of the most incandescent and risky and reckless and sensual sort, a love big enough to take in the world and conjure the erasure of everything so beloved. Hers is a poetry that is ruthless in its intensity and terrible beauty. It's a "creature of tongues, it watches from shadows." It tells us, "Take off your skin." The message is urgent, and dangerous. It makes us want to live in such fire." ---Cecilia Woloch

"What a selfless and exact view of the world Ann Fisher-Wirth gives us in FIVE TERRACES! These poems step away from the daily rush of enterprise and take the larger, longer view of the world from an honest and hard-won distance. She sees each past in its own light, and especially in the two mirror poems that begin and end the book, the poet gives herself up to her subjects in a poetry whose first project is meaning, a clear and honest embrace of luminous particulars that blesses and transforms us all." ---Christopher Buckley

"By turns volatile, tender, contemplative, reverent, or confessional, Ann Fisher-Wirth’s poems in FIVE TERRACES are also acutely intelligent, passionate, searchingly honest, revelatory, and moving. While traversing a wide range of outer geographies--from Mississippi to a Ming dynasty landscape to Uppsala, Sweden, the poet also charts a great expanse of her inner topography, revealing therein the myriad complexities of identity, in her various roles as wife, mother, daughter, and artist. In this rich, impassioned, and wise collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth extends our appreciation of what comprises dignity, love, loss, transcendence, and grace." ---Maurya Simon

Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Wind Publications (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893239446
• ISBN-13: 978-1893239449
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,685,400 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 an artistic and fearless collection, November 2, 2005

By 

a fan (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Terraces (Paperback)

Art is at work throughout Ann Fisher-Wirth's second full-length book. The collection is brilliantly framed by the two halves of "Walking Wu Wei's Scroll," a long poem about a work of art dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Fisher-Wirth steps into the scroll and leads us on an imaginative journey across its terrain. Thus we move into the twin worlds of Art and the Past. The second of seven sections contains "The Trinket Poems," fearless and fascinating poems about a little-known Tennessee Williams' play, "The Mutilated," in which Fisher-Wirth played the role of Trinket. In the poems, she mixes her character's life with her own as daughter, wife, mother, teacher, actor. By putting the spotlight on the various roles she plays, both on- and offstage, she sketches in the intersection between art and life and suggests that we are destined to replay the past again and again. This latter theme is further developed in poems about a father's death, a mother's death, and even a dying cat. A number of poems take a close look at marriage. In these, the speaker enjoys the security and comfort that come to the long married but regrets and longs for the lost passion and exhilaration of earlier days. Among the most poignant of these poems about loss are those about the speaker's first child, a daughter, who died at birth. Even years later and with other children, the speaker grieves for that child, a grief her other children inherit. In "Moth" the speaker recalls reading at night to her children:

. . . and their sweet
bodies and hair grew sticky with summer as they
sprawled all over me, there was a moth
at the window, a soft moon-splotched moth battering at the window
and that moth could never get in
no matter how they opened
and opened-

Fisher-Wirth's grip on craft is flawless and evident in many ways, most interestingly in the artistic arrangement of her poems on the page. She gives us poems that butt up to the left margin, prose poems that take up the whole page, and poems that dance across the page. And she gives us a number of multi-part poems that in their divisions suggest a speaker seeking to know how the pieces of her life fit together to form a coherent whole. We cannot help but admire Fisher-Wirth's attempt to make something beautiful out of her life and ours, an attempt that beautifully succeeds.

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite pain, April 24, 2009

By 

Philip B. Freyder "Felipe el Forastero" (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five Terraces (Paperback)

Fisher-Wirth gives us beautifully crafted confessional poetry. She exquisitely presents the pain she has lived, wrestled with and largely surmounted.