Amazon.com: The Wave-Maker: Poems (9780393066593): Elizabeth Spires: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2008

A contemplative, witty new collection from a "jewel of a poet" (Los Angeles Times).

In Elizabeth Spires's sixth collection of poetry, the pilgrim soul, in its various guises, meditates on its own slow becoming, finding humble companions in creatures as unlikely as a lowly snail, a prehistoric coelacanth, or a tiny Japanese netsuke of a badger disguised as a monk. For Spires, life is both a pilgrimage and a deepening—birth, death, and transformation all part of a seamless continuum. Possessed of a calm, crystalline sense of eternity, her poems invite fellow travelers to sit for a little while and be cleansed of the dust of existence.

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A contemplative, witty new collection from a "jewel of a poet" (Los Angeles Times).

In Elizabeth Spires's sixth collection of poetry, the pilgrim soul, in its various guises, meditates on its own slow becoming, finding humble companions in creatures as unlikely as a lowly snail, a prehistoric coelacanth, or a tiny Japanese netsuke of a badger disguised as a monk. For Spires, life is both a pilgrimage and a deepening—birth, death, and transformation all part of a seamless continuum. Possessed of a calm, crystalline sense of eternity, her poems invite fellow travelers to sit for a little while and be cleansed of the dust of existence.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Quietly serious, trustworthy and often sad, this sixth collection from Spires (Worldling) finds the poet preoccupied with first and last things: death, illness, age and debility take up much of the book, while ascetic religion, in the lives of monks and nuns, occupies more hopeful poems near the volume's end. Though only 58 years old, Spires looks back on her life as if from near its conclusion: "Like an idiot child, I piled my pretty stones,/ knowing the waves would knock them down." One of her best new poems considers the video game "The Sims," where "Adults never get older & old people can do/ anything young people can do." Again and again Spires depicts the flimsiness of all human life-defining "house," for example, as "a leaf over my head." Some will object, understandably, that Spires' new poems lack intellectual rigor-but they might well make up for that lack in their moving frailty, even giving us (as Spires sometimes implies) models for the later chapters in our own lives.
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From Booklist

Let us look to small things for clues to vast mysteries, Spires suggests. Although the poet feels monstrous looming over a snail, watching its waving eye-stalks and admiring its mobile home and stately progress, the tiny creature is the perfect totem animal. After all, poets seek to halt the hurry of life and to be aware of each step on the road, through the maze, or “up a slippery, snowy hill.” Addressing a cricket in her basement, Spires chants, “You seem to need nothing, nothing / except a place, a space to be quiet in,” which is exactly what every meditative soul longs for. Refusing lushness, Spires creates lean lines that hold the weight of thought and feeling like rope bridges over a chasm. As she watches birds and prayers take wing and a beetle basking in the sun, and considers the ancient coelacanth yanked up from the dream of the ocean deep into the inferno of day, Spires asks, must we forever scramble, gathering all that is scattered and asunder? Can we not know coherence and wholeness? --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews