My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Paperback]

Ms. Talvikki Ansel (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: September 4, 2009

Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, ""Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin."" This cycle of ""freewheeling sonnets"" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, and many other excellent poets came to national prominence early in their careers through the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The 1996 winner, chosen by James Dickey, was Talvikki Ansel. Dickey writes that Ansel's poems evoke "the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed." The writing is beautiful, and often plays with the space between expectation and reality, as in "In Fragments, In Streams." Ansel writes: "Haley's Comet crossed the jungle sky / that April, six mornings in a row / I woke to hike out to a clearing / and never saw it." The constant expectation of "days fading / in and out of showers," the shock of biting into an apple seed ("almond taste / cyanide, the bitter hint, liqueur taste"), and other revelations of the natural world fill these pages.

From Library Journal

Whether she is describing a pear ("The tear-shaped, papery core,/ precise seeds"), noting how her hairs falls in her eyes as she dissects a bird ("Inside out/ the wing's white bone/ juts up"), explaining how her mother cut off the top of an egg "with one swift crunch," or observing "The bright painted crosses/ on the steepest banks" in the Amazon River Basin, Ansel has a great sense of physicality, exact, strenuous, and totally unsentimental. The poems in her first book, the winning volume in the Yale Younger Poets series for 1996, are detailed and densely descriptive, but they don't feel lush; they're much too matter-of-fact. The poems move purposefully from bird hunting in the Amazon to a panicked deer hunt in the northern woods to a "shining archipelago" in a cobalt-blue sea but remain rooted in the world. Ansel's cool, clinical tone may startle?we're far from Wordsworth's daffodils here?but the poems contains riches that can be plundered again and again. For most poetry collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 70 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300070322
• ISBN-13: 978-0300070323
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 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: #2,656,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book To Return To, April 21, 2002

By 

Lee Ann Roripaugh (Vermillion, South Dakota USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Hardcover)

I love these poems, and find myself returning to them again and again over the years. Talvikki Ansel combines the acute precision of a scientific eye with shimmering, translucent, finely-honed language. Her mastery of the sonnet form in the second and third sections of the volume seems virtually effortless -- as if the poems have simply transcended the rigors of form. These are poems of fierce and delicate inquiry (a study of bats, the dissection of a bird, the exploration of a pear down to its very core, the unraveling of the memory of a season spent in the Amazon Rainforest); poems of travel, explorers, and exploration; and poems of being forever changed by the processes of inquiry and exploration, like Caliban, or Elizabeth Bishop's Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, perhaps Ansel is, or will be, our Elizabeth Bishop of the new century. Ansel's poetic voice is clear, warmly modulated, and threaded throughout with marvelous flickers of quiet whimsy and humor. These are poems that resonate and linger. I highly recommend this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She shells see shells by the sea sure, October 8, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

Telvicki Ansel communicates the multiple awareness of self, nature, and the unmanefest. She can have you hold a pear as she has held it, and feel the humorous frustration of raising miniature horses.

"My Shining Archipelago" is a real find.