The Profile Makers: Poems [Hardcover]

Linda Bierds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1997

Beauty of language, dazzling imagination, and a fierce empathy for her subjects distinguishes Linda Bierd's poetry and has made her "America's premier poet of description" (the HUDSON REVIEW). Whether writing of the cave paintings of Altamira, Rembrandt etchings, or Mathew Brady's glass plates, Bierds uses the captured image to explore larger issues of memory, grief, and loss .

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Bierds's fifth collection (following The Ghost Trio, LJ 9/1/94) will take your breath away. Using interrelated poems to examine the image through various 19th-century technologies developed to capture it, Bierds astonishes with her abilities to build a sustained work of pathos and beauty. first She first presents Matthew Brady's photography through the voice of his assistant's cousin, who relives tragic family events by examining six family portraits taken by Brady. The central image of greenhouse glass?it seems that discarded glass negatives were used as greenhouse windows?is introduced here and recurs throughout, as in the brilliant image that concludes a poem spoken by the aged Dorothy Wordsworth: she recollects a hawk that crashed through several walls of greenhouse glass and "lay in a bloodshawl/ of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass/ on the brick-work floor repeated its image./ Again and again and again./ As all we have passed through sustains us." These difficult poems will reward the patient reader with clarity and beauty. A winner.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...a radiant collection... The tightly coiled imagery that distinguishes Bierds's fifth volume of poetry is often as surprising as it is beautiful.... -- The New York Times Book Review, Scott Veale

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Owl Publishing Company; 1st edition (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805055355
• ISBN-13: 978-0805055351
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,143,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of our best contemporary poets in top form., May 19, 1999

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[e-mail] (Lynd, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Profile Makers: Poems (Paperback)

The language and perceptions are at all times rich and surprising. Individuality without self-display. Powerful imagination but always in service of a vision both broad and detailed. Intoxicating work, often historically rooted.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent, January 18, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Profile Makers: Poems (Paperback)

This is a first-rate collection. Bierds explores questions of image, frame and contour in poems which trace, in a sense, a modern history of representation. A glorious example is her "The Breaking-Aways," an elegant poem which begins with Samuel Morse's astonished reaction to his own invention and which ends with his rhythmic remembrance of a childhood encounter with a mysterious sound in the forest, when he "made from that / scream, from that wondrous outrush, / something apart from wonder." Very highly recommended.