Normal view MARC view ISBD view

Bite every sorrow : poems / Barbara Ras

By:

Ras, Barbara

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 1998.Description: xii, 79 p. ; 24 cmISBN:

0807122637

Subject(s):

Poetry, American

DDC classification:

811.54 RAS

LOC classification:

PS3568.A637 B58 1998

Summary: Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious."

Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Libro - Monografía	Biblioteca Pública de San Miguel de Allende, A.C.	811.54 RAS (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Expurgado/No disponible		056151

"Winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 1997"--P. v.

Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious."

There are no comments on this title.

to post a comment.