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tickets for a prayer wheel

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Annie Dillard's collection of twenty-four poems, TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL was first published in 1974, the same year Dillard published her Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-known work, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. In the thirty years since, she has written nonfiction narratives (HOLY THE FIRM, LIVING BY FICTION, TEACHING A STONE TO TALK, THE WRITING LIFE, FOR THE TIME BEING), a memoir (AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD), and a novel (THE LIVING). By reissuing Dillard's long-out-of-print TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL, Wesleyan University Press has allowed many grateful readers to finally complete their Annie Dillard collections.

TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL confirms that Dillard is a poet at heart. In her poetry, like most of her later work, Dillard explores science, nature, time, and theology. Her poetry is related thematically to PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK in that both books attempt to answer Thoreau's question, "With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?" Whereas we find the speaker of title poem "looking for someone who knows how to pray" (p. 50)--"Who will teach us to pray, who will pray for us now," he ponders (p. 53)--we find Dillard asking the same question in her most recent book, FOR THE TIME BEING (1999). From her first book to her last, Dillard's answer remains the same, "God teaches us to pray" (p. 60). "He has no edges," Dillard observes, "and the holes in him spin./ He alone is real,/ and all things lie in him/ as fossil shells/ curl in solid shale" (p. 61).

TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL offers both short, accessible poems ("The Clearing," "Day at the Office," "Puppy in Deep Snow") and longer, more challenging poetic meditations ("Feast Days," "Bivouac," "Tickets for a Prayer Wheel"). Wesleyan's reissue also includes an excellent Foreward by Michael Collier.

G. Merritt

Very strange stuff is contained in this hard to find book. Annie Dillard is famous for her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek novel. However, I enjoyed this earlier work much more than anything else I have read by her. The poems range from thought provoking, to totally off the wall. Hardly a one of the poems are short of enjoyable. The title poem is worthy of its place on the cover, it struck a chord with me immediately.

Jamie

Annie Dillard's Tickets For A Prayer Wheel is an impressive and highly recommended collection of lucid poetry, elegantly written in free verse, concerning the mundane, the natural, and the mystical. Matter-of-fact narrative gives way to descriptive elegance of brevity in this inspirational work. Deciduous trees/have dominion. But look on bark;/molds make fruiting bodies/out of air. Winner/take all. Grab/a handle. Earth/rolls down like dolphins dive,/headlong to dark.

this book ebbs and flows like the wind of an autumn day...