No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Alicia Ostriker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry Series | Publication Date: March 15, 2005

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky."

It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.

Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting and Jewish identity. If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page. Clean, unambiguous lines (reminiscent of Robert Pinsky's) present her speaker as an explainer, a bringer of news: "Sometimes I feel like a mailman who faithfully visits each door in his district,/ Sometimes like a mermaid out of water." Ambivalent poems about New York, Jerusalem and Berlin praise "days when to walk a city/ is like feeling completely healed." A group of poems responds to major works of Eastern and Western painting and classical music, like Botticelli's, Mozart's and Bonnard's "mysteries of domestic/ Life in the modern void." Ostriker has achieved recent prominence with nonfiction devoted to Jewish experience, and she ends with an emphasis there; a final set of ambitious longer poems juxtaposes a history of suffering, recent events in Israel, the Iraq war and the travails of the poet's mother. "Where did she go, my hopeful young mother/ My mother who promised we would overcome/ The bosses and bigots?" Ostriker concludes: "I want her// To come back and try again." (Apr.)
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From Booklist

In her newest collection of clarion poems intimate and worldly, Ostriker writes about her life as a wife, mother, and grandmother with tenderness, but she is also edgy, erotic, funny, and ornery. She misses cigarettes, darn it, and reminds us that "too much goodness is bad." She revels in the density of cities even as she suggests that New York should offer tourists maps of crime scenes, including the street where John Lennon was killed (her title is taken from a Lennon lyric: "Imagine there's no heaven"). She writes of her mother's death, and of war, keenly aware that writing about loss has always been the lot of poets. But this valiant, wry, and nimble poet does not resist the lure of beauty as she translates into shimmering language the wild choreography of sex, and basketball players moving in sync like a flock of barn swallows. Ostriker's tonic poems remind us that although we are the animal that kills out of rage and greed, we are also creatures of grace and harmony. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; New edition edition (March 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822958759
• ISBN-13: 978-0822958758
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,560,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Achievement from an Essential American Poet, August 29, 2005

By 

Richard Tayson (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Alicia Ostriker is a quintessential American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser. NO HEAVEN is the follow-up to Ostriker's brilliant VOLCANO SEQUENCE (lamentably left off the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award lists)--and here once again we find Ostriker writing poems about real people, crucial human experience and the spiritual essence that runs through everything. NO HEAVEN is a brilliant collection that is hard hitting ("Liking It," "Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It," "Elegy before the War,"), tender ("Brooklyn Twilight," "In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage"), and humorous ("When we leap, we hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap" from "Pickup," ". . .when/that brilliant Jew poet took/The train for the next world/American nirvana/Temporarily went with him" from "Elegy for Allen.") NO HEAVEN contains crucial poems for our misguided times from one of America's (or should I say the world's?) best, bravest, and most eloquent poets.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything Poetry Should Be, June 23, 2005

By 

Jane Augustine (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

No Heaven is a terrific book-- just what poetry should be: at once moving, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and new because it opens heart and mind again. Death is always present as real, heightening consciousness. Every poem contains "a piercing glance into the life of things," as Marianne Moore said, a unity of soul and form. Ostriker reveals the horror and sacredness of everyday life by constantly reinventing the words believed to be ordinary, here transformed. Buy this beautiful collection and find yourself in no heaven but on incandescent eternal ephemeral earth -- the place to be human.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry in the Moment and After, February 3, 2007

By 

Glenn Raucher (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

(Alicia Ostriker read at the West Side YMCA on Friday, February 2, 2007 as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series. This is from my introduction to the event).

Reading Alicia Suskin Ostriker's poems in No Heaven is like having someone who needs to impart something essential to you leaning in, quietly and yet with great intensity, showing you something of utmost importance, never lecturing, never condescending, the unearthing of vital information seeming to occur in the moment of telling, so when, the payoffs in the poems themselves take place, in the burst of the revealed moment, the impact is intense and profound.

The ease of the language, its casualness and conversationality might make one overlook to care with which the language here is wrought.

Alicia shows relationships as clearly the commingling of two distinct entities; whether we completely understand the person we're with or not, these poem's simple conversations mirror the familiarity of those long together, whether lover, family member or dear friend. There's that easy connection, yet always so fragile, knowing that we must make ready to part from all we love and hold dear, and yet how we must always stay in the moment, so that what we have will not become subsumed by what we have lost, or will lose. She writes, in the poem "Mid-February":

"Friend, it's a day for a walk
are we going to walk it?"

...and that becomes the challenge of these poems, to have us not waste the day, not take for granted that the beauty and pain and joy and sorrow will continue ever on.