Stone Crop (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Hardcover]

Ms. Jody Gladding (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: June 23, 1993

Jody Gladding's Stone Crop, the winning volume in the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 700 entries in this annual competition. Stone Crop is a collection of poems written over the past ten years. Many of the poems represent Gladding's attempts to synthesize landscape with sensibility, to restore the organic world's hold on our human imagination - its gossip value. Other poems try to find an effective political language, free of diatribe but not of outrage, frequently using mythical counterparts to make contemporary events resonate. The poems have other traits in common. Their attention often moves from the thing to its name, underscoring Gladding's conviction that the same organic processes generate both. Many wrestle with their metaphors, expressing the poet's attraction to and suspicion of that poetic device. Many layer images, aiming toward texture rather than pronouncement. And most are, at least to some degree, autobiographical.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a lukewarm introduction, Dickey (who chose this unimpressive volume for the Yale Younger Poets prize) praises Gladding's kinship with nature. Moving on to the poems, one finds only the most superficial understanding: "The locust thought / she'd die, she laughed / so hard." Couched within prosaic and labored stanzas, the imagery throughout this book is unspecific, hence cliched. "What's true remains there," she says in another nature poem, describing roots buried under snow. Those few poems that contain concrete images are even less believable: "Little boat, / you can bear us / over the dark, over the broken water" a minuscule poem about pregnancy begins; in another poem she writes: "Under the clothesline / I find a whalebone corset / and try it on." Dickey might have more aptly pointed to Gladding's affinities with his own work: the volume's most ambitious piece, an eight-poem sequence on "the eight situations in which it is difficult to see the Buddha or hear the dharma" seems a weak, overlong imitation of his "The Heaven of Animals"; other poems haltingly strive for the dream-like narrative that is Dickey's trademark.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

But What About The Stepsisters
Deer Crossings
Eight Difficult Situations: 1. Realm Of Hungry Ghosts
Eight Difficult Situations: 2. Hell
Eight Difficult Situations: 3. Realm Of Blind, Deaf, Dumb
Eight Difficult Situations: 4. Into Realm Of Those W/common
Eight Difficult Situations: 5. In Realm Of The Animals
Eight Difficult Situations: 6. Heaven Of Longevity
Eight Difficult Situations: 7. Remotese Districts
Eight Difficult Situations: 8. Realm Of Those Born Before
The End Of Daylight Savings
Fish Song
The Fisherman's Wife
Footwork
Full Moon Summer Solstice
Gifts
Here, A Shark's Eye
In Their Clarity
Locust Shell
Luna Moth
Midwifery
Momento Mori
New Snow
Of The Many Words For Snow
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 1. Wolf's Milk
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 2. Silver Queen
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 3. Firestones
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 4. Tinder
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 5. Blue Willow
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 6. Cut Foot
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 7. Close
Pieces For Mouth Organ: 8. Indian Paint
Praying Mantis
Shoemaker And The Elves
Sometimes I Went To A Dark Place
Spell For Not Entering Into The Shambles Of The Gods
Taughannock Falls
Touch
Undercurrent
When I Dismantle My Shrine
When You Reach Up
Wild Leeks
Wings
Winter Walk
With Child
Worsted Heather
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 48 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (June 23, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300055439
• ISBN-13: 978-0300055436
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,122,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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