The poems in The Keep are influenced by art, by paintings, by thinking about abstraction and figuration and the space between, beauty apprehended and lost, the divine apprehended and lost. Emily Wilson's poems are also saturated with nature; from the great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted to the caribou mov[ing] through us beyond numerous, each image connects the natural world of tides and marshes and forests to the human world of documentation and preservation. The image of the keep as a place of safety and as a kind of prison also informs this very strong collection.
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From Publishers Weekly
"Nothing possessed me/ but the ordinary// strain of distance/ upon natural objects... There was this/ skeleton inside me," observes the speaker in Wilson's neo-pastoral poetry. Spare, condensed grammar and impenetrable nature affirm the stripped-down speaker's estrangement: "River of steel./ River of no one becoming you." When Wilson, head of Spurwink Press, occasionally uses the first-person plural, she deftly confuses the speaker: "We are not waiting?// We are waiting?// We are the red studio?// We come just before the math?" (Sept.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Emily Wilson lives in Portland, Maine, where she is the proprietor of the Spurwink Press, which publishes letterpress editions of poetry books; she graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1999. The Keep is her first book.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Unknown but you are",
By My Friend Tree (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Keep (Kuhl House Poets) (Paperback)
It's been a few years after this book was published, and I still come back to it with the kind of fervency it originally called up in me. Why? Because it's prayer where "No church utters up." Because Wilson rewrites W.C. Williams' dictum, "No ideas but in things," to read "All my material/idea." Because its crush of diction and alliteration-- how the latinate and vernacular are woven together through consonance and assonance--thrills the ear and mind simultaneously: "when you've turned yourself/out I'll come to//perennial/paresthesias//the cosmos all//obviate." Because, in a way unique in contemporary letters, the spiritual, natural and moral all meet here fitfully in "unquiet/country," in a poetry of the natural world that makes nature neither pure solace nor utterly alien, but, much like Wilson's conception of God, it is, heartbreakingly, "Unknown but you are." Because of the uncertainty inherent in this world view, the voice of this book is often "Pinched to the far wrong side of pleasure," caught in the line-break between doubt and faith, observation and emotion--and each time I read the book, I learn from this struggle: "Let the good I am bide a little longer."
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