Ocean Avenue (New Issues Press Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Malena Morling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999 | Series: New Issues Press Poetry Series

Poetry. Winner of the 1998 New Issues Poetry Prize. The poet's sense of wonder is contagious whether she views the world from her seat on a train, from the window of her apartment, or from the streets of the city. Through a subtle, mediated surrealism, Mörling reins in the urban landscapes of New York, drawing the reader into her meditations on the temporal and the spatial, on the language itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Clouds, bag ladies, violinists, skeletons, pigeons, salt, and warehouses cohabitate in Malena Mrling's first book of poetry, Ocean Avenue. The title is appropriate for there are mentions of the ocean throughout the book, though not specifically as a body of water. The ocean is a sky, a consciousness, a place to live and breathe, a place where so many life forms belong to each other:

Because the ocean is also the air:

the air that floats above

the crowded intersections

in any city

and the air that hangs in doorways

of houses that are suddenly deserted. -- Ruth Ann Daugherty, Crab Orchard Review, Winter 1999

Like a modern-day Whitman the poet loiters at her ease, in her case among the crowds of Grand Central Station 'a little ecstatic from looking up at the constellations in the green and gold ceiling.' Listening 'to the skinny violinist play Paganini' she stands still letting the music touch her and feels 'the whole station inside' her awareness. Thus it is also a book of enormous calm; indeed I cannot think of another collection of contemporary poetry more conscious of our need for the violence of continual change and more at peace in the center of that violence...This is poetry whose aim is no less than to recall us to what Wallace Stevens regarded as the greatest gift of creation: to live in a physical universe. -- Philip Levine

Malena Morling's passion is for observing. She sees everything - victims, suicides, lost mothers, compulsive counters, blind women in buses - with a penetrating eye, outside but sympathetic at the same time. She is deeply aware of the moment of "passing through" and it informs her poetry. Ocean Avenue is subtle, lovely, and original. -- Gerald Stern

Malena Morling's poems have enchanted me for the past six or seven years. Her voice and her subjects seem to constanly open, to lend new perspectives, new feelings about what it is to see and hear and wonder, about what it is to be alive. These poems make me smile into my thoughts like the orphan in "Another Poem of Gifts." Morling is so generous with her gifts I feel I have been slightly aware of where her poems point, but was asleep until now. -- Michael Burkard

This is a remarkable first book---taut, often egoless poems that subtly nudge the reader into territory that's wholly original yet also familiar. Each poem creates a minor shock of recognition. -- Chase Twichell, Ploughshares, Fall 1999

About the Author

Malena Mörling received an M.A. from the Creative Writing Program at New York University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, New England Review, Countermeasures, Boulevard, Marlboro Review, and Mudfish. Her translations into Swedish of Philip Levine's poems have been published in the Swedish journal Artes. She has translated into English recent poems by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer that have appeared in a latest volume of his work in English, For the Living and the Dead, published in the fall of 1995 by Ecco Press. She teaches poetry workshops through the New School. Occasionally she writes articles on culture for a Swedish evening paper.

Product Details

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932826687
• ISBN-13: 978-0932826688
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #429,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In admiration of Morling's accomplishment, May 10, 2002

By 

"j_hartt" (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ocean Avenue (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

In OCEAN AVENUE, Malena Mörling captivates us with an eyeful of American urbanity-crowds, traffic, pigeons. But the cumulative effect is not "the color of pavement" (20). Mörling's muscle as an observer lies in her selection of detail, as well as her imaginative empathy. She's drawn to the human experience; one may be reminded of Whitman's Civil War poems. Mörling is well aware of life's harsh realities-violence, poverty, loneliness, private suffering-as seen in poems "Among Pillars of Dust" and "For Bartleby." And because Mörling is conscious of her own mortality ("First Thought," "Visiting," "Three Daffodils," "Let Me Say This"), she expresses a greater sense of immediacy by rightly speaking in the present tense. No wonder she chants her own version of carpe deum: "Walk more slowly now" (20). But what I admire most is the way Mörling treads "between two contraries," as Robert Hass might say, by letting the world speak through her, while also claiming certain universals-which simply means: "...we still ask the questions: / `Where do we come from? / Who are we? / Where are we going?'" (59).

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and simple, June 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Ocean Avenue (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Morling's poems are are fresh and deceptively simple, and alive. There are definite overtones of Eastern philosophy and religion here, as in the superb "Standing on the Earth Among the Cows." Ocean Avenue is full of careful observation, celebration of the everyday. A great new voice and a generous new heart in American poetry.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, fresh and perceptive., August 20, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ocean Avenue (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

A beautiful book dealing lightly with dark subjects, filled with fresh modifiers, weighty conclusions, and perceptions as intense as a child's. Morling holds onto things that have passed through most of us, weighs them, and puts them on shelves so we can look at them again. Great stuff!