An anthology of poetry by the author of Heart and Perimeter and The Stillness, the Dancing journeys through time to capture the ghosts of humankind's shared consciousness as revealed through the mirrors of imagination and immortality. Reprint.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
In her fourth book of verse, Bierds continues to unearth lost lives with a rich, compulsive imagination that is seemingly organic rather than historical. The "ghosts" in this collection include Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, James Whitfield, and Emma Wedgwood Darwin. The title poem begins with a section about Darwin, poet-botanist and grandfather of Charles. As a child in his mother's room, he places his hand inside the hollow leather head-like form that has held her wig; the snow of talcum powder that falls on his hand is reminiscent of a Dutch painting of skaters he's seen before: he imagines fish beneath the ice, "stunned/by the strange heaven-dotted with/boot soles and chair legs" ("The Ghost-Trio"). From a child's dim alienation to a coal miner's share of immortality to a scientist's fixation on natural detail, these vivid intersecting worlds reflect and contain one another. This brilliant, subtle, and difficult work is highly recommended.
Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Bierds' fourth collection, while shaped by an extraordinary structural adeptness, expresses a vital, personalized sense of history. Every poem in this gorgeously organic and visionary volume is genetically related to the others, with certain images functioning like chromosomes, split and recombined in different times and different places. The first poem is set in 1748, and it introduces one of several connected families as well as a nameless family of coal miners. Louis Pasteur and Toulouse Lautrec also make brief but stirring appearances. These "characters" inspire Bierds to ponder the value of scientific observation, the act of creating beauty and unchanging perfection, and the artist's idiosyncratic interpretations of life. Mixing an alchemy of images from fire, water, and dust to fish, birds, and bats, Bierds explores the magical unison of nature and time. Donna Seaman
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An intelligent, beautiful, important collection.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ghost Trio (Paperback)
Austere and sensual, intellectual and tender, scientific and lyrical, peaceful and electrifying--"The Ghost Trio" makes paradoxical magic. For Bierds, tiny fish, ice skates, cow horn, coal dust are materials of the world that become lexical talismans--rub on them, examine them, and find yourself journeying through history as though guided by spirits.
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