Hurricane Walk (New Poets of America Series: No. 13) [Paperback]

Diann Blakely Shoaf (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Shoaf seems to have enjoyed selecting every noun and verb in these 40 quiet, "well-polished" poems. After a walk in a hurricane ("I saw thin sheets of water/ spin like ghosts from the Charles"), she feels "honed, quite essential." With this patient, refining vision, she searches for a focus of "pure sensation" in becoming pregnant ("Soon I'll cradle a belly,/ and dream names in the dark"), seeing her mother become old ("I watched her shrink, and it scared me"), and "small measures" of what it means to be American. Combining a purifying sensibility with compassion for loss, Shoaf extracts "the grace of the gesture" from the "usual cravings" of "messy careers." To see things "honed, quite essential," as Shoaf desires to, is to understand them. For most poetry collections.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 65 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (January 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091852685X
• ISBN-13: 978-0918526854
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,639,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diann Blakely is the author of three books of poetry as well as an editor, essayist, and reviewer. She has taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, Watkins Arts Institute, and served as senior instructor and poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A Robert Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Blakely has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Best American Poetry 2003 and Pushcart Prize Anthologies XIX and XX. A few of her other distinctions include having her first collection, Hurricane Walk (BOA Editions, 1992) listed among the year's ten best by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies (Story Line, 2000) named a Choice of the Academy of American Poets' Book Society; and her third collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America while still a manuscript-in-progress, then the 7th Annual Publication Prize from Elixir Press, which issued the collection in 2008. A poetry editor of Antioch Review for a dozen years, Blakely continues work on Each Fugitive Moment: Creative and Critical Responses to the Life and Work of Lynda Hull, and in February, 2012, she will begin co-editing an anthology, Belles Gone Bad: From Bourbon Street and Beyond, Before, During, and After Katrina. Currently completing her fourth manuscript of poems, Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson, Blakely remains a contributor of poetry and other arts reviews for Antioch, BookPage, Chapter 16: Tennessee Humanities Council Online, Harvard Review, Nashville Scene / Village Voice Media, as well as pursuing a year-and-a-half-long collaborative project--with at least three dozen other poets, essayists, photographers, film-makers, and fiction writers--on Southern poetry and its necessarily entangled themes of music and race. She lives south of Savannah with her husband, the author and music writer Stanley Booth.