Shepherdess with an Automatic is intense and perceptive, full of lyrical, descriptively vivid poems that range across cities and centuries. From bleak British moors to the crowded London underground, from steamy American summers in rural settings to the chaos of urban club scenes, these poems capture history's vibrant, unsettling presence in contemporary times.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
In thoughtfully rendered poems, Satterfield considers history as flame...writing with the furor of a woman led to the stake..." -- Washington City Paper, May 12, 2000
From the Publisher
Shepherdess with an Automatic introduces a unique, and unforgettable voice. A dual national born in England but raised in the United States, Satterfield examines the nexus of literary tradition with American and British culture: from safe, yet suffocating, pastoral worlds, the poet breaks free into the chaos of a British soccer riot, or, with a thoughtful, objective eye, documents the death-throes of the Sex Pistols; from Mannerist paintings to those of Jackson Pollack, from Celtic fertility symbols to bleak, British landscapes, Satterfield's poems discover the perfect metaphors for her central subject, in the words of Eleanor Wilner: "Anglo/ American anguish at the absent green pastures of an old refuge...given voice in dazzling turns of phrase."
Satterfield's attention to the special heartbreaks, and fulfillments, of women's lives combines frank autobiography with passages of extraordinary descriptive power, and she is equally at home in the personae of figures as diverse as Frieda Lawrence or M.F.K. Fisher. Through all her poems, as Judith Hall observes, Satterfield's blend of "turbulence" and "unusual composure" shapes a collection in which sounds themselves become "delicate enticements for change." Shepherdess with an Automatic clears away the preconceptions of so much contemporary verse to lay new ground in the form of poems descriptively vivid, intellectually rigorous, geographically true, and always, deeply moving.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We Have Only Accidents to Believe In,
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This review is from: Shepherdess with an Automatic (Paperback)
Poets must cringe when they run across these kinds of reviews (Salinger's Seymour Glass found the scribbling in the margins of library books most depressing)--who knows what to say about poetry, especially one who is a casual reader? But here one can at least say what one likes or dislikes. I like this book of poems. In "Shepherdess with an Automatic" one finds short poems, usually no more than a page in length, that flash in your mind as if in recollection and that build upon each other to create a presence that suggests your past is much more than a burden to overcome--it is your inescapable undersong. One finishing stanza that I think marvelous, from "Nocturne", "The trick is to remain unenticed by another:/not impressed, but not beyond impression,/adrift and at home in recognizable streets" is perhaps what seems most central to these poems and this poet. In "Small Life" (I'd love to reproduce it, as it is my favorite and my wish for you to know it if you do not buy this book) the poet reflects upon a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, depicting a man, no more than a shadow of a man really, frozen in mid-air, about to step into the middle of a large puddle of water. "Is this//what it means to be immortal..."? "--See how the shadow below/stays close, attuned/like a soul or most perfect mimic." (A shadow, a soul, a mimic is "at home and adrift in recognizable streets.") After reading this several times I had to find a copy of the photograph (I've pasted it into my book!). Satterfield's poems seem to hover just outside of experience, or rather, outside the reflection upon experience--apparitions returned to make sense of the past. "I like to feel water slip/off the skin,/the lightness after/what cannot be lifted/is lifted." "What is the body?//A barrier to the crossing." "How I'd like to believe in hope,/but the past, it seems, is like gravity,/the force that keeps us in place." At home and adrift but always in the same (recognizable) place.
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To get there you had to go where many had gone before, taking the archaic route the dream of commerce had cut past worn ramparts, the Ridgeway over the hill. Read the first page New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
To get there you had to go where many had gone before, taking the archaic route the dream of commerce had cut past worn ramparts, the Ridgeway over the hill. Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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