Frail-Craft (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Paperback]

Jessica Fisher (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: April 2, 2007

Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft is winner of the 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Glück’s fourth selection for the series. The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Louise Glück's fourth pick as judge of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger poets prize is a debut filled with dark, ethereal verses and prose poems. Fisher is interested in language's tragic slipperiness and its capacity to make the familiar alien: "despite the eye's illusion, parallel lines do not converge: so it was that we walked the canal in tandem, you on the north side, I on the south." These poems often long for, but cannot make, connections; they employ varied forms, including dreamlike fables ("Now—the parade. Lions, red, black & yellow. They never go anywhere without a drummer"); graceful lyrics, such as the title poem ("men still drown/ in order to know the difference between sky/ and whatever name you give the deep"); and aphorisms ("he was both the egg/ and the one who cracked it—"). By the end, Fisher's unflinchingly intense voice does begin to drone, but she brings to her poems a satisfying and often very powerful seriousness of purpose. (Apr.)
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Review

"Reading Jessica Fisher''s first collection of poetry is like wandering through a garden of forking paths that at times give suddenly, astonishingly, onto the sea. . . . Extraordinary. . . . These poems are reminders of how great a burden their frail craft can bear."—Boston Review

(Boston Review ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300122357
• ISBN-13: 978-0300122350
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 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: #944,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What you find when you're lost, December 4, 2007

By 

Shannon A. Merillat (Dickinson, ND) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frail-Craft (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

Fisher does not pander to the type of reader who seeks clarity. The poetry of Frail Craft is demanding, and the reader must struggle to understand the nonsensical nature of the connections she makes and unlikely relationships she draws. Regardless of how hard the reader struggles, he or she shouldn't expect to reap complete understanding of such connections. Fisher's intention is not to flaunt her intelligence, but rather to allow the reader to appreciate reading as a process. Celebrating the medium, she frequently references structural components of language, including them in the worlds she creates. The lines "...finally the sea and the sentence enters," "then and then is the time of your verbs, every one of them conjugated" (10) and "Words that might have been puns flooded the living room" (15) all integrate the elements of language into the physical world.
In appreciating the process of reading, Fisher's poems also celebrate and explore process in more general terms. Within "Novella" lies the line that best epitomizes the unifying theme of the book: "What you find when you're lost you can't look for, I'd argued: you'd have to get lost to find it again" (39). The title of her first poem, Journey, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Fisher depicts the world through which the narrator and the reader search with senses heightened in terms of absences, more often describing what is not there than what is. She speaks of what people are not doing, what is not known, what colors do not look like, images she does not remember, things one should not do. The lines "It was not here he fell" (8) "I don't remember who spoke..." (10) and "What the jetty is like--gone, because the beloved is gone--" (7) offer the reader a more striking impression than descriptions of strictly what is present could offer.
In many of her poems, danger is a recurring theme. Danger is one of the few concepts that Fisher is confident in her knowledge of existence. "The Wedding," "Three Dreams," "Dream for my Other Brother," "Errata," "Reckless" all revolve around the concept. Fisher specifically refers to children and her brothers as the ones in danger.
Fisher's language generally has a formal air, as if she were addressing strangers with particularly specific and official matters. The subjects of her sentences, however, are not subjects of an official nature. Fisher's incongruous pairing of formal tone and playful subject matter creates a sense of absurdity. Reading the preceding formal language, one would hardly expect the thing that the narrators is "compelled to tell you" is that "yesterday the sun shone" (17).