Coffman's skillful, absorbing collection was selected by Alicia Ostriker as the winner of Kent State University's 1995 Wick Poetry Prize, an award given annually to a poet who has not previously published a full-length collection. In long-lined narrative poems steeped in detail, Coffman links the past century's miners', mill workers' and farmers' wives with their present-day descendants, depicting circumscribed lives filled with daily grace and loneliness. In "Glenmary, 1990," Coffman writes: "Summer: one child's in the cellar for lying,/ four shout with the high voices of running/ where the yard grows dark." This journey into the soul of working-class, small-town and rural America avoids risky territory, touching on a passive frustration without ever fully exploring it. The poems often end in soft generalizations or safe natural imagery. "Rapture," which owns the provocative line, "I have thought I might be a hater of Jews," concludes: "we must turn of a piece/ but there is nothing so good/ as the row of furrows cut in the earth." Coffman is at her best when she refuses to pull her punches, as in "Romeo Collision," which moves directly yet with subtlety into the intersection of love and fear.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
About The Pelvis
Beaded Tongue And Groove
The Boy With The Blueberries
Brother Ass
Cheerleaders
The Cicadas
Cold Sunday
Courage, Or One Of Gene Horner's Fiddles
Dog Days
February Landscape With Moons And Hearts
Fever
Five Sapphics To A Friend On Returning From A Trip
For Najeema, 6, Who Admitted To Hitting Renee
For Sheila's Julia
Girl / Spit
Glenmary, 1990
The Graveyard
In Envy Of Migration
In Fraser's Mills
In Trout Season
Learning The Butterfly
Leaving New York City
Likely
Maps
Memling's Virgin
On A Mill Worker In Rockwood
The Products Of Hog
Pulled Down
The Quality Of Sweetness In Men
Rapture
The Road To Canso
Rogue Gene
Romeo Collision
The Simple Day
The Small Town
Walking Under A Straw Hat In Tuscon
Weather
What The Day Is Made Of
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
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