Heaven-and-Earth House: Poems - Softcover

Swander, Mary

3.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780679765684: Heaven-and-Earth House: Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679765689 ISBN 13: 9780679765684

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A collection of lyrical poems and dramatic monologues has been honored by the Whiting Foundation and is set in the author's native Iowa, where they pay tribute to the area's earth and its animals. Reprint.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Back Cover:

"This poem-in-voices, this narrative-eulogy, this American Gothic celebration is that original and rare thing: a sustained work of art wholly at one with what it makes. Neither simply lyrical nor sequential, it is a single, simultaneous gathering of mourners, relatives, characters, those left behind, those who, in both the tragedy and comedy of circumstances, must, against the silence, speak for themselves. Driving the Body Back is powerfully aural, even choral, in ways we expect of an earlier, regional American literature, from Sherwood Anderson to Faulkner to Eudora Welty. There is really nothing to compare it to in our poetry."

Stanley Plumly

Succession

"Mary Swander writes a spare yet elegantly modulated verse. Its clarity and its narrative control, which creates surprise and inevitability of disclosure almost at once, give it an authority that is rare in a first book. Her observations are acute, her sense of the poem's development is unerring. She is never mawkish or hysterical, never 'poetic,' yet her poems radiate great feeling." Mark Strand

From the Inside Flap:

arth House is a book of lyrical poems and dramatic monologues that attempts to explore the balance between the physical and the spiritual, the mind and the body. The book is set and grounded in Mary Swander's own Midwestern landscape. It follows her quest to find her sense of place within the surrounding Amish countryside of her native Iowa, and to find her sense of self within and without her physical body. Through gardening, tending goats and sheep, through her work with massage, over and over again she is put in touch with the five basic elements. Earth, water, fire, metal and air come to encompass not only a schema of medicine but a life process that seeks finally to find the hope of "worldly" transcendence.

Always close to the earth and its animals, always beautifully constructed, always masterly in the ways of storytelling, Mary Swander's poems are experiences both moving and profoundly delightful.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.