Magdalena (Marie Alexander Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Maureen Gibbon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Marie Alexander Poetry Series | Publication Date: April 1, 2007

“Gibbon’s Magdalena offers a fresh and profound voice to American poetry. Comparisons are impossible because this book doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve read in years. I loved it.”—Jim Harrison

Magdalena is a finely drawn collection which, with sometimes painful honesty, examines the vagaries and vicissitudes of a heart in conflict with itself. The poems invoke the nature of an independent woman embracing her sexuality, travels, and being in the world.

Maureen Gibbon is the author of a novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow. She teaches at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Maureen Gibbon is a the author of a novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow. She teaches at Bemidji State University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: White Pine Press (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893996832
• ISBN-13: 978-1893996830
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,911,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've thought of myself as a writer since the 6th grade when I wrote a poem that had the word lemondrops in it and my teacher liked it.

I began writing fiction when I was in college, and parts of what I worked on in my very first fiction writing class eventually became my first novel, SWIMMING SWEET ARROW. If I look at it that way, it took me 20 years to finish the book. I guess I'm getting speedier because THIEF, my second novel due out in April 2010, only took me 9 years to finish.

Sometimes people say my work is plainspoken or blunt. I take that as a compliment. I believe sex is a life force and I try to write about it as straightforwardly as I can. I try to let characters live within their desires and obsessions, because most people are works in progress. I let characters say what they want and need to say.

The natural world is also tremendously important to me, and it makes its way into my work all the time. When I was revising a scene in THIEF, I knew it needed something, but I wasn't quite sure what - and then I decided to put a salamander in it. It was important to have my character Suzanne notice this tiny, moist animal crossing the road at that moment in the book.

My work has been translated into German and Norwegian and will soon be translated into Italian. Bompiani, my Italian publisher, bought THIEF before anyone else did. Va bene!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars woman poet explores different experiences while keeping her sense of self, January 14, 2008

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Magdalena (Marie Alexander Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Gibbon's prose poems track what makes a woman, and what she is after she is made. Regarding the former, "On the island, women are moored like boats...They are tied to logs sunken in the shore-bottom or to metal rings along the shore sea wall of the port...[with] a blue world [the men] do not know how to see or harvest. Sometimes a plank of wood splits in one of the boats...She may also split silently so that you would never know." [from Un Bruit Qui Court] Regarding the later, "[b]ooks and paintings, languages and cities...were sweet to want but they didn't change me. They did not shape me the way picking row after row of pears did...All those years, and I still feel like that girl who worked hard, who worked hard all the time." [from Work]

But not all for Gibbon is biographical and reflective. There are times when longing arises. But even "in love I keep a part of myself separate. The animals stay in my dreams and their hearts beat in each house I make...." [from Kicking Horse My True Husband; the title poem of a collection of this poet which was a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets] Through dreamy imagery, hardship, or longing, Gibbon never looses herself.