Publication Date: October 1, 2001 | Series: New Poets of America (Book 23)
In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney's poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts "Raven": a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker's fears and angst. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Donald Hall has written the Foreword.
Meg Kearney is the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation. She was the recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and New York Times fellowships and received the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Prize in 1998. She lives in New York City.
Meg Kearney is the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation. She was the recipient of a 2001 Artist's fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She also received a New York Times fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Prize in 1998. She lives in New York City.
Meg Kearney's first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher's guide (available for free on the author's Web site), came out in 2007. Four Way Books published her newest collection of poems, Home By Now, in fall 2009. Home By Now is the winner of the 2010 PEN New England Award as well as a Finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Meg's picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic (date TBA). Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor's "A Writer's Almanac," and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, and Ploughshares, and the anthologies Urban Nature (Milkweed, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press 2005).
Recipient of an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998. Meg is currently Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, as well as Director of Pine Manor's Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University.
This review is from: An Unkindness of Ravens (New Poets of America) (Paperback)
If , in our modern world, we ask whether women are still vulnerable, we need only to turn to Meg Kearney's An Unkindness of Ravens for the answer. In "Swan Song" "She knew his boots were full of mud...She felt him watching through the dark...She could smell him now. Beer and cigarettes...She'd known [what he intended to do] by the way he'd come in the door." He had brought the "rush of rain" from the porch into their bedroom..."Making a mess of everything." While the effect of a drunken man is strongly demonstrated in one poem, Kearney clearly gives us a more encompassing picture of female loss in "Love is a Form of Recklessness" when she relates that "My mother's love is the strength to walk and keep on walking, drive and keep driving until her daughter has learned to live without her..." In this volume, Meg Kearney even touches on that famous "La Belle Dame" who gave and gave "until at last she'd given it all away." This is not to say that Kearney only contemplates the causes of female depression. Many of her poems also reflect fond memories of a father lost and chances for a new love found.
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