The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (New Poets of America) (Paperback)

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
7 A.m., A Man And A Woman
After A Noisy Night
Amen
At The Musee Rodin In Paris
August
The Bumper-sticker
The Cellar
Chanel No. 5
Days Of Rules
English Flavors
Fallen
The Feather At Breendonck
Fountain In Avignon
From My Windows, I See Mountains
Hotel Des Touristes
The Hour Between Dog And Wolf: 1. The Good Ogre's Beard
The Hour Between Dog And Wolf: 2. Herman The Bastard
The Hour Between Dog And Wolf: 3. Feeding The Rabbits
The Hour Between Dog And Wolf: 4. The Hour Between Dog
In Pocatello
Inventory
Ladybugs
Leek Street
Letter From Jake's Place, Durango
Little Sisters Of Love And Misery: 1. May Field Trip
Little Sisters Of Love And Misery: 2. Sister Kelleen
Little Sisters Of Love And Misery: 3. Glass-shard Night
Little Sisters Of Love And Misery: 4. Night Song
Little Sisters Of Love And Misery: 5. Cruficixion Dawn
Lost Souls Roaming
Loving You In Flemish
The Machinations Of The Mind
Migration In Red
Mortal Art
The Old Window In Bruges
The Pallor Or Survival
Parentheses
A Paris Blackbird
Plastic Beatitude
The Pump
The Radiator
So It's Today
A Sunday Drive Through Eagle Country
The Syllables Of Longing
Taxi
This Morning, God
Unable To Find
White-out
The Worlds In This World
Zen
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

The quality of passionate wisdom in the poetry of Laure-Anne Bosselaar astonishes and grips the reader. This poet confronts us, finally, with recognition of our universal responsibility for being. "Think of it," she says, "the worlds in this world," while "an infant/ sucks from a nipple, a grenade/ shrieks"; while a Chinese woman painstakingly sews one silk stitch "guards [take] only/ seconds to mop up a cannibal's brain from the floor/ of a Wisconsin jail. What a range of human emotion is here - all that is, but self-pity. Even through shattering childhood years boarded in a Belgian convent school, Bosselaar's connection with the pain of others helps her survive. The title poem, "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf," vividly portrays the ways a rejected child and the town outcast could give spiritual nurture to each other. Sifted through the filter of mature experience, the telling resonates as elegy for "the bearded ogre. In the book's first section located in the Europe of her childhood, drama reverberates, and powerful story; but Bosselaar blends authenticity of memoir with fearless poetic resonance. Images dramatize feeling. "The Cellar" pounds with the child's projection of her terror onto potatoes as living, hurting creatures: "uprooted and cluttered in crates,/ limbs groping for a wedge of light from a cellar door." The child's body, too, puts out tendrils of yearning for root-nourishment. This is the child who will grow up to be the poet who sees in tumbleweed and snowflakes the loneliness of "lost souls roaming. The later parts of the book speak in quiet tones of loving marriage, of the American landscape, and gratitude for the sanctity of the ordinary. From her courageous journey, Laure-Anne Bosselaar brings us the gift of true poetic insight. -- From Independent Publisher

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; 1st edition (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880238470
• ISBN-13: 978-1880238479
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #861,349 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent treasuring of the world as it is., June 8, 1997

By A Customer

"[N]o girls, no jokes, no wine// Is that what art demands?/ ... I can't endure such sullen habits, I want distraction,/ need my gaze to waver, wild as moths on my window: ... Let me be fickle as the Mistral, lazy as Provencal lizards;/ give me the nuances of tenderness,// longing's appetites, the pagan buzz of sex--and may my art/ be mortal ... a daily brush with grace." If the moral of mortality is treasuring the world, then moral intelligence is steeped in its particulars. Laure-Anne Bosselaar's poems make the case as art, or if you prefer, meditation--pagan Ignatian, procreative, or in its most inclusive, practical, caregiving sense, charitable. In modeled stanzas she recaptures good-burgher Nazi sympathizers, spent vegetable gardens, snowstorms, a fatally overinspired poem, her husband's morning Rorschach shock of graying hair, convent school underwear, her mother's Gauloises Bleues dipped in Chanel No. 5, and other coups de grace. The last poem celebrates Thanksgiving, an immigrants' feast, a fitting reminder that the book's language--in one of the author's adopted languages--is comfortably, confidently expressive. It's a good cook's English that savors the telling as well as the tale

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dramatic and compassionate, July 17, 1999

By A Customer

These compelling narratives span post WWII Europe to contemporary USA -- the speaker, raised in a convent in Europe traces her life in the cruel environment of the convent to her married life here in this country. The poems are of daily life -- its joys and horrors. They are generous poems, long and meandering. They are accessible, always. Funny, sweet, scary and sumptuous.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling narratives that speed down the page., March 19, 1999

By A Customer

Bosselaar's collection is electric. These narratives, often harrowing, speak the stories of many characters. The geographic and emotional terrain of this book is panoramic. This is a book of narratives that speed down the page and take the reader on one hell of a ride.