Gone To Earth [Paperback]

Pam Rehm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Poetry. GONE TO EARTH is Pam Rehm's first book in six years, and one of startling clarity and precision. These poems address isolation and companionship in modern life, and search for what is necessary- in regards to both poetry and belief. In praise of her previous work, Robert Creely has said, "She makes each edge of sound, of a word's various meanings, articulate with impeccable art." Rehm is the author of four previous volumes of poetry including TO GIVE IT UP, a winner of the 1994 National Poetry Series award.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Taking its title from British novelist Mary Webb's WWI-era bildungsroman in which a young woman seeks to discover herself amid the pressures of social conventions, Rehm's third collection seeks to carve out a space where the individual has the freedom to make decisions and evaluate them according to a personal set of ethics, beliefs and religious ideas. Written in concise and rigorous one- and two-line stanzas, the poems of Gone to Earth are even more emotionally condensed and intellectually concentrated than those of similar theme and scope in The Garment in Which No One Had Slept (1993) and To Give It Up (1995). Tersely Dickensonian propositions ("What we think is imminent/ is already far behind"; "Nothing is altogether self-ruled"; etc.) are subject to a kind of internalized empiricism, weighed against the dilemmas of possession and being possessedby others, by oneself and, finally, by language: "The word is my word// The world is my surmise." Inquiry is thus how one "goes to earth." The interaction Rehm sets up between such metaphysical strains and the everyday as politicalthe personal as politicalis an equally engaging problematic, one her work never fully resolves: "Paper money/ and men's perceptions// What is a profit/ and how will it redeem us?" While private in their sensibility and resistant to any particular doctrine, these poems will have readers posing such questions to themselves. (May)Forecast: A 1994 National Poetry Series award winner, Rehm was a co-editor of the influential mid-'90s literary journal apex of the M. This collection is the first for Flood Editions, a Chicago press cofounded and co-edited by poet and former Chicago Review poetry editor Devin Johnston. Both house and book should garner review attention in the independent media.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 50 pages
• Publisher: Flood Editions; 1st pbk. ed edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971005915
• ISBN-13: 978-0971005914
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #137,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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