And, for Example (Poets, Penguin) - Hardcover

Lauterbach, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670858838 ISBN 13: 9780670858835

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1994

Synopsis

In And For Example, her fifth volume of poetry, Ann Lauterbach considers the ways in which language constitutes a shifting landscape of examples by which we come to know ourselves and the world. What we choose to name is as significant as what we choose to ignore or forget, and these choices, whether in the personal articulations of love and grief, or in the public domain of politics and commerce, inform our actions on the temporal stage.
One choice determines the next, as notes in music or strokes in abstract painting, and the poem is built from a series of such gestures, each of which is complete in itself. "Our Lady of Provocation... whose meanings we can piece together/ from her journals that were torn into bandages/ to wrap the wounds of the dying."
In Part One, "The Untelling," Lauterbach explores the instability of facts. In the long central poem, "For Example," she elaborates the links between the perceived and the real in our determination of what is true. In this poem's final two sections, she invokes a fire (inspired by her witnessing the Oakland fires of 1992) as an image of the transformational force from which new ways of seeing and making might occur.

About this title

About the Author:

Ann Lauterbach is a professor at the City College and the Graduate Center.

From Booklist:

Lauterbach divides her fifth collection into three sections. The first contains freestanding poems in which images transform--wild garments changing into lacerating stone within two lines, journal pages mutating quickly into bandages for the dying, air becoming a sleeveless shirt. The second section, "For Example," is fittingly prefaced by an epigraph from John Ashbery, "These are examples of leaving out"; thereafter, in a series of interconnected poems, Lauterbach attempts to present a story by stringing together thoughts and actions representing what is left out. In large part, she succeeds, putting a spin on tale-telling by including only elements of detail rather than a linear plot. The third section, "Ashes, Ashes," contains dedication and memorial poems, the best of them a long piece for Henri Matisse in which Lauterbach takes on the painter's persona to deliver first-person observations that flow and overlap much as his paintings' colors appear on canvas. In terms of lyrical language, Lauterbach sets a great example. Elizabeth Gunderson

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0670858838
• ISBN 13: 9780670858835
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128