These are poems that delve into the sensual with all its joy, pain, myth and reality. No one does it better than Diane Lockward.
Temptation by Water
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Diane Lockward's poems are powered by her witty, sometimes wicked, voice.
--Kathleen Flenniken, Mid-American Review
These poems play across the tender spectrum of temptation, from the pleasures of birds "looping and soaring, cradled by air," and "a bowl of mushroom barley soup to slurp" and "the sea/ like liquid emeralds," to "the hard shell" of grief.
--Sally Rosen Kindred, Connotation Press
. . . a deft balancing act between contraries: joy and loss, male and female, the lush and the sere, the buoyant and the fallen, the surface of things and the inner life. The tone of the poems achieves a range from deeply sad and moving to deliciously wicked and funny.
--Susan Meyers, Pirene's Fountain
Lockward is expert at reflecting complexity of emotion; her wry, battle-scarred humor refuses to be vanquished, and some of the angriest poems in the collection are also the funniest.
--Marjorie Tesser, Harvard Review
--Kathleen Flenniken, Mid-American Review
These poems play across the tender spectrum of temptation, from the pleasures of birds "looping and soaring, cradled by air," and "a bowl of mushroom barley soup to slurp" and "the sea/ like liquid emeralds," to "the hard shell" of grief.
--Sally Rosen Kindred, Connotation Press
. . . a deft balancing act between contraries: joy and loss, male and female, the lush and the sere, the buoyant and the fallen, the surface of things and the inner life. The tone of the poems achieves a range from deeply sad and moving to deliciously wicked and funny.
--Susan Meyers, Pirene's Fountain
Lockward is expert at reflecting complexity of emotion; her wry, battle-scarred humor refuses to be vanquished, and some of the angriest poems in the collection are also the funniest.
--Marjorie Tesser, Harvard Review
From the Back Cover
In Temptation by Water, Diane Lockward "calculates the sum of her griefs" with a vigorous and mature poetic eye. Whether mourning the loss of a lover's touch or celebrating steam rising from the slit of a baked potato, Lockward embraces life's luscious, naked flaws and ecstatic turns, surrendering to desire and what's left in "the wreckage of absence."
--Dorianne Laux
--Dorianne Laux
Diane Lockward is a wickedly good poet . . . very much in touch with how wayward human impulses can be and how delicious also.
--Baron Wormser, former Poet Laureate of Maine
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More About the Author
Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006) which received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003), and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. She is the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has received awards from North American Review, Louisiana Literature, the Newburyport Art Association, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. A former high school English teacher, Diane now works as a poet-in-the-schools. www.dianelockward.com
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the year's best,
By Patricia Fargnoli, NH Poet Laureate 12/2006-3... (NH, United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Temptation by Water (Paperback)
The poems in Temptation by Water are tough and tender; funny sometimes, serious others; always imaginative and exquisitely crafted. Full of music, they are, finally, songs of the heart. I love this book for what it teaches me of life and grief and desire. Don't miss it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling,
By
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This review is from: Temptation by Water (Paperback)
Diane Lockward's Temptation by Water is a wonderful read for its depth, variety of subject matter and sound. There are poems of loss, desire, and humor. Her tone is both intimate enough and distant enough to bear irony's smart sheen. This is a difficult balance to achieve and Lockward does so with great skill.The poems of loss are deeply moving. In "Without Words for It," Lockward uses the extended metaphor of grammar: "Without the noun of his name, no need/for adjectives to perk things up, less for adverbs." In "How Sarah Wins the Essay Contest," Lockward uses the rational structure of an essay in a way that contrasts and highlights a girl's deep sense of abandonment. And in her poem, "Implosion," the heart breaks the way a power plant implodes, "No fire, no flames, no heat./Just the soft mushroom of dust and ash,/The quiet collapse inside." There is a finely crafted tension in this book between the desire for intimacy and for solitude. In the title poem, "a kind of paradise, not one human in sight" and then a poem that is all desire, "The Very Smell of Him." There are many playful poems. One called "Happy Hour" ends with these stunning lines, "Let the engines idle,/the dark roads remain untraveled./Let the hands of the clock hold us." And a poem called "Leaving in Pieces" that begins with a comic call to Kafka, "One morning I awoke/and found myself married/to a bald man." Lockward takes in the world deeply and widely whether she is writing about something as simple as an onion or as complex as the human heart.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible Poems, Incredible Collection!,
By Kelli (Northwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Temptation by Water (Paperback)
I have been a fan of Diane Lockward since I read her book, Eve's Red Dress. Lockward is a poet whose work is accessible, engaging, and smart and this fourth book by Lockward doesn't disappoint! Temptation by Water is both poignant and humorous--something I truly appreciate about the best writing today--her work is able to deal with serious situations, but in a way that creates connection with the reader on many levels. In the title poem (which is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Henri Matisse's "The Open Window," Lockward writes:She floats inside the frame, like Alice free-falling down the hole, enters this other world, leaves her work on the windowsill. . . And we do enter this other world through Lockward's poetry. We float throughout the book, through loss and palm oil, humpty-dumpty and a full body massage, through the waves of happy hour, the Jesus potato, a weatherman who says "desire," but means "disaster." This is what I love about Lockward's latest book, we never know where we will end up, but she cares for her readers making sure we are always entertained and continually surprised by her vision and words. Truly a book for those who love seeing an ordinary world in an extraordinary way, Lockward does this and leaves me wanting more. Highly recommend!
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