The Ghost of Eden [Paperback]

Chase Twichell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

Vividly realized, emotionally gripping, these poems of Chase Twichell's confront the crucial issue of our times: the death of nature as we have known it. The Adirondacks, with their beauties and dangers, are the setting for many of the poems. They are inhabited by the fox, the bear, the fishercat. One is rabid, another dead, the third a life-sustaining dream. The "ghost" is both the shadow of the paradise we have so carelessly ruined, and the poet herself, from whom the elegy for it is wrenched. These are dark poems, frontal and unflinching, but they are illuminated by the poet's powerful love for the earth, and by the heightened, surprising joys forced from a new intimacy with her own mortality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Someone at the party said it was impossible/ to imagine the death of the species/ ...but I could imagine it." In this impressive fourth collection, Twichell investigates human destruction of the natural world. She conveys the enormity of the subject with unflinching intelligence, all the while rejecting sentimentality, blame and solutions: "It's beautiful anyway,/ the lacerated wilderness..." Taking an observer's stance, she courts a chilly distance, but the poems generate the requisite heat with the poet's precise, original and frequently brilliant use of language: "I'm an animal/ shivering in the Godlike glitter,/ the burial of earth by light/ and then by light's extinction" ("Little Snowscape"). Lyric moments enrich the work: "The earth as it has always been/ is saying its goodbyes. Another world/ will overrun the emptiness,/ but I love this one." This ambitious, compelling collection estabishes Twichell as a major voice in contemporary poetry.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

"It was the thing outside the human/that I loved, and the way/I could enter it," writes Twichell in "The Pools." This notion suggests the joys and limitations of her fourth book of poems, a series of elegies for the vanishing natural world. Twichell has outstanding gifts: deer tracks are called "splayed hearts" in one poem; in another she sees mountains "casting/their blue winter shapes/down into the valley." She weds fascinating messages of fear-fraught love for this "loved world" with whiplashes of contempt for the despoiling human race, of which she is apparently an unwilling member. Twichell is a poet of such dazzling and profound imagination that despite moments marred by morbidity and agitprop opinionatedness, her work will be of immense interest to most readers of poetry. For most collections.
Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Ontario Review Pr; First Edition edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865380910
• ISBN-13: 978-0865380912
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 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: #559,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 stars Angry Nature, September 16, 2008

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T. Rehfeldt "Amateur Classic Scholar" (Northern, WI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ghost of Eden (Paperback)

Chase Twichell writes poetry beautifully. She has a wonderful sense of rhythm and form. Her poems flow and take the reader along. She is a splendid observer of nature and this shows in her work. She occasionally gets you into the poem and then smacks you in the face with unexpected violence. As an observer and commentator on nature she is comparable to Mary Oliver. But, where Oliver celebrates the beauty and meaning of nature, Ms. Twichell laments it's distruction and loss. Both are probably necessary but the results are quite different. If you are in the mood to be uplifted read Oliver. But if you want ammunition and encouragement in a fight to save the nature we have left, by all means read this book.