Spells for Not Dying Again: Poems [Paperback]

Diana O'Hehir (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1997

The oblique and private darkness of Diana O Hehir's earlier work has been wrenched open in these new poems, its latent violence confronted.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Body
Box
Casualty In Mexico City
Child
Climbing
Coming Home From The Party
Dialogue Between Body And Soul
Empty God
Final Anatomy
Funeral
Ghost Spells: Night Encounter
Ghost Spells: Night Watch
Ghost Spells: Travelers
Ghost Spells: Web
House
It Sits Behind The Pillar On The Porch
Letters To The Dead: Funeral Scroll
Letters To The Dead: Warm Stone
Library
Map
Persuading The Reluctant Boatman
Recognition
Recovery Spells: Again
Recovery Spells: The Ordinary Run Of Things
Rooflines
Seasonal Change
Spell For Coming Out By Day
Spell For Not Dying Again
Spell For Protecting The Heart After Death
Spell For Regret: Archaic
Spell For Regret: Cat Fights
Spell For Regret: Dismantling
Spell For Regret: Eye
Summoning A Boat
Trying To Enter The Guarded Gates
Waking
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0910055319
• ISBN-13: 978-0910055314
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,188,771 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wild and Magical, January 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Spells for Not Dying Again: Poems (Hardcover)

Always the peculiar spell of Diana O'Hehir's way of using language has made her poetry exceptional, and exceptionally interesting. She has an irresistable inclination for the unexpected, doubtless because O'Hehir's imagination has a will of its own. It has a quality which brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is wild, and it is magical, but it derives from actual life and authentic emotions and ideas. The reader enters a real garden, although some of the details, creatures and scenes in it are imagined. The unique quality of this imagination seems to originate in listening, listening to a voice that is not the same as the voice we find in her fiction. It seems, in fact, "summoned." In Spells For Not Dying Again this ever-present wildness is doubled by O'Hehir's use of the Egyptian Book Of The Dead. Although the poems begin with the problems O'Hehir encountered in dealing with the death of her ex-husband, years after a troubled marriage and divorce, the poems also deal with other deaths, including the expectation of her own.