Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A master of simile and metaphor.,
By
This review is from: Zero Degrees at First Light (Paperback)
Christine Potter has a genius for simile and metaphor.
The chintz couch borne by "pallbearers in dark clothing.'' The chlorine that "tastes like light should." The jet circling LaGuardia "trailing artificial thunder." The Hudson by moonlight, "an aluminum road upstate." And my favorite: "the thunder starting up like an old car somewhere down the darkening street." Her imagery makes diaphanous and transient nature magically vivid and palpable, and the whole book's packed with glittering moments that made me stop and marvel, "Yes, that's exactly how it looks!" I believe they call this the shock of recognition, and I was pleasantly shocked--often.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine book to get lost in,
This review is from: Zero Degrees at First Light (Paperback)
Early on, those poems which evoke something of the poet's delighted love for her husband and the way this is complexly informed by their respective families and pasts were the first to grab me, but as I continued, I found that the book contained several wide-ranging effective registers. Perhaps because this book is so profoundly resonant with places, I found the freedom to get "lost" in it, as Christine Potter puts it so beautifully herself in "Talking to Beethoven, 1967": "...Music sounds different/ to me now. The best is like waiting for snow/ all day: see it begin, see the most tender flakes dissolve/ in a creek that barely moves. Soon enough, /everything else just disappears." This is not a book of escapism, however, except insofar as it points out that human tendency with some appreciation for its comforting services, but one which wrestles and which at times hits a prophetic note (it dares to contain poems with titles such as "A National Anthem" and "A Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church"); her voice rings at once with what would seem to be surety of mental or emotional postures on various issues, social (that is, the war) and spiritual, but the overtones and "half-muffled changes" of the bell are full of questions and longing: "Sometimes I fear all I have done/ is not enough, that I have to be truthful besides,/ and wise as the end of time..." "All that suspends any of this is hope/ that God is a bell which must soon awaken me,/ a constant, flawless performance I lack ears to hear/ but real and fleeting as any other music." I look forward to hearing more of what these ears pick up; it is a fine debut.
Deborah J. Shore
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
360 Degree Views From Here,
By
This review is from: Zero Degrees at First Light (Paperback)
Meshing time past, time present, and time future; as profound in what isn't said as in what is; raising myriad questions left unanswered through precisely observed and richly suggestive details of the mundane moment. Reading these poems filled me with ideas, recollections, and emotions. And isn't that the point? I highly recommend this book
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
