The Oval Hour (Iowa Poetry Prize) [Paperback]

Kathleen Peirce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999 | Series: Iowa Poetry Prize

In The Oval Hour, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language--which is to say the vulnerability of our reality--when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of Confessions, twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. "Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence": these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of carnal and metaphysical identities.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The world fleshed forth in oil paint, from Giotto to Joseph Albers, is meticulously essayed in the mixed-genre ekphraseis of Swensen's sixth full-length collection since 1984. Though the medieval and early Renaissance tableaux she focuses on are almost entirely composed in the restricted vocabulary of Christian iconography, Swensen regards them with a worldly eye, using her role as "translator" of the worksAfrom religious past to secular present, from image to textAto explore an ethics of human immanence. Addressing herself to one in a countless string of mid-millenium representations of "the Flight into Egypt," for instance, Swensen finds "that the holy family enters not a heavenly but a very worldly world, a world just like ours except that it's not and that it can't be reached." As with the gulf between the visual and the verbal dimensions, what the mind posits as an inviolable border ("it can't be reached"), the body is ever violatingAtranslating, tryingAin practice. In a literally unguarded moment, the intangible yields to an insatiably human craving for contact: "She touched the painting/ as soon as the guard// turned his back." This illicit gesture discloses the very essence of Swensen's project, her daring try at a communion of flesh and canvas, word and image, art and life. FYI: Try was one of three works awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1998, along with Bin Ramke's Wake ($10.95 136p ISBN 0-87745-658-5) and Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour ($10.95 96p ISBN 0-87745-664-X).
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Review

"There is an overtone of Christina Rossetti in these poems, partly discernible in the hindered devotions of the Confessions series and partly in the unresisted sensuality of the poems about (largely) women. Two Sisters is the most disconcerting poem in this line since Goblin Market. Peirce has emotional authority and intellectual passion--an inevitable triumph." -- Richard Howard

Amaranth
Butterfly House
Confession 1.13.20
Confession 1.8.13
Confession 10.8.13
Confession 11.11.13
Confession 11.23.29
Confession 12.6.6
Confession 13.9.10
Confession 2.5.10
Confession 2.6.12
Confession 3.10.18
Confession 3.2.2
Confession 4.13.20
Confession 4.2.3
Confession 7.21.27
Confession 7.5.7
Confession 8.1.2
Confession 8.9.21
Confession 9.10.25
Confession 9.4.10
Confessions 11.19.25
The Dead
Divided Touch, Divided Color
Dreaming All Night
Dyke Breach
Edenic
Evening Poem
Expulsion And Annunciation
Figure With Trees
First Lines
Five-part Question
Grace
Grief
Heav'n Hides Nothing From Thy View
Her Sleep
His Watching
Homage To The Romantic Ballet
Jessamine
The Many Colors
Mirror Forest
Mother And Son
Mountain Laurel
Nearness And Entrance
Nude Against The Light
Of The Veritable Ocean
Ovidian
Person, Place, Gesture, Thing
Personae Separatae
Pieta
Poem
Poem In Summer
Promesa
Pygmalion In March
Red
Riddles
Round
Seahorse Forest
Self-portrait As Landscape
Taking Pleasure
Thimble Forest
Thought Might Nod In Waves
A Trade
Two Sisters
Wren
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

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Product Details

• Paperback: 86 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087745664X
• ISBN-13: 978-0877456643
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A much deserved winner of the William Carlos William Award, July 27, 2000

By 

eduardo C. corral (Iowa City, IA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oval Hour (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)

Rarely have I felt such an intense joy in discovering a new poet: Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour (and her first book Mercy) has reawakened my belief that a poet's vision of the world TOUCHES reality -- it's as if vision is transformed into a pair of hands. Miss Perice's poems are beautiful, they internalize the world and reflect back doubt and awareness. A man's gorgeous thumb in her mouth. A delicate drinking thing made of cup and mouth. A father who becomes a black line eating snow -- just some of the moments when the outside and the inside converge in her poetry. Listen, if you are a serious reader of American poetry and are tired of overt academic poets who know the world but can't see it; if you're tried of poets frightened by "I", poets who fragment their perspectives and voice(s) until their poems resemble hothouse flowers taking root in nothing but air, then read Miss Peirce's The Oval Hour. She sees the world. She writes as if she knows the world is looking back. And if you're really a serious reader of poetry, go back and reread those "academic" poets because you are, after all, a reader.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars East Coast Reader, May 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Oval Hour (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)

Another stunning work by Ms. Peirce. This book has also been awarded the William Carlos Williams award for 2000. Add this treasure to your collection of Peirce poetry.