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Collected Poems Paperback – May 15, 2012

by Naomi Replansky (Author)

3 customer reviews

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Nominated for the National Book Award in 1952, Naomi Replansky's first book Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. Here at long last is the new and collected work of a lifetime by a writer hailed as "one of the most brilliant American poets" by George Oppen. Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson, the passion of Anna Akhmatova, and the music of W.H. Auden. These poems, which Marie Ponsot calls "sixty years of a free woman's song," are Replansky's hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Here in a book, the work of a life. All the poet Naomi Replansky is here: the dry, quiet voice, the incantatory and familiar rhythms that are never quite what you think they are, the wit, the touch of comfort, and the tongue-lash, the modesty that entirely frees her from trend, and the audacity above all the audacity, the risk-taking, the nerve of the woman! These poems bear honest witness to what it was to be alive, really alive, in the twentieth century, and I turn to them again and again for courage to face the dark opening of the twenty-first. --Ursula Le Guin

Naomi Replansky is a major American poet, long overdue for acclaim. She writes skillfully, both in and out of strict form, crafting lines carefully, with concision and rare intensity. Her poems are the real thing; her collected work of a lifetime deserves the widest possible hearing. --X.J. Kennedy

Naomi Replansky's poetry rings with reality and wisdom, and it is always song. Her observant, political wit and gravity are as piercing and as necessary now as ever and I would say more so . . . her voice and her way of reading are among the very best we have. --Jean Valentine

From the Inside Flap

Nominated for the National Book Award in 1952, Naomi Replansky's first book Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. Here at long last is the new and collected work of a lifetime by a writer hailed as "one of the most brilliant American poets" by George Oppen. Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson, the passion of Anna Akhmatova, and the music of W.H. Auden. These poems, which Marie Ponsot calls "sixty years of a free woman's song," are Replansky's hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.

Product details

Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: Black Sparrow Press; First edition (May 15, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1574232150
ISBN-13: 978-1574232158
Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #708,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3708 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > United States
- #82416 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States

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excellent poetry

January 10, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

she's under appreciated. i am amazed and happy to find this treasure. i gave it as a gift to my mother who was born around the same time Naomi was writing. Edna Milay is a contemporary and they both made beautiful poems out of tragedy.

Comment

Out of the Darkness

November 28, 2012

Format: Paperback

Recently I compiled a list for the online blog Band of Thebes or my favorite GLBT books of 2012, and I named this book, remembering only then that I hadn't written about it on Amazon, nor about the mix of complicated feelings that came about when I picked up this book at an independent store and saw this book--its cover markedly different from the one Amazon pictures above. It's a cover hard to describe. but it's two profiles both facing off towards their left, I thought at first two women of different races, but probably the same woman once when young, the other with sun-darkened skin and the snow white hair of extreme old age. I take it that Naomi Replansky is still alive, for there are recent poems collected in this book, and she must have been quite handsome in her youth, if the short dark hair and the long neck and the exquisite long lashes of "Youth" on the cover is any indication. And she's still pretty amazing looking, though a bit like Ossie Davis in his last days, but this might be the over-enthusiasm of Black Sparrow's designer.

As befits an author who mourns Grace Paley and George Oppen in her acknowledgments, Replansky gives us back nearly a forgotten world of radical enthusiasms and controversies from the mid-1930s (Discrete Series time!) and I cannot be alone in finding these some of the most beautiful poems in the book. We can hear Auden in them, the committed Auden, and I think of the dynamic Hollywood films of William Wellman from his Wild Boys of the Road period; a poetry of the people, and yet perhaps a little bit removed. One brief series is called "Sideshow," and the characters, like the ones Bob Cummings and Priscilla Lane run into in Hitchcock's contemporary Saboteur, are travelling entertainers in a circus, the "Half-Man Half Woman" (she must shun when he pursues/ Down divided avenues"), the "Mammoth Man" (who stares "from wintry acres of despair"), the "Quick-Change Artist" (who "takes his shape and size/ From the image in your eyes"), and the "Tattooed Lady" are wry, angry self-portraits, or perhaps portraits of conflicted intellectuals in the American Communist party of a certain period? The tattooed lady has her heart and her life written on her skin, making her "public," Replansky asserts, and I wonder how much radical politics allowed her, and prevented her, from living out a life of committed same-sex affections and rejections.

I don't know as much as some about American poetry, but I was surprised indeed to discover in this remarkable book the life work of a poet as fine as Auden or Oppen or any of her contemporaries, and yet I never heard of her! That's always a great feeling, isn't it, and yet brings its own disquiet because, I thought I was educated! Anyhow here's to Black Sparrow, thanks for another must-have book. Maybe this, the first review of Replansky's Collected Poems to appear on Amazon, will be only the first of many.

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Worth Memorizing.

October 27, 2015

Format: Paperback

A treasury of memorable poems, words of meaning and lyrical beauty. No running off at the mouth here, these poems are econimical, refined, concentrated, with endless value in each carefully chosen word. They make sense, they pack power, and express deep feelings and thoughts. Unlike most contemporary poets, the author has total command of her craft. She is an artist with language. Her poems are not only worth reading, but worth memorizing. They should be taught in schools to children and all English majors.

One person found this helpful

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