The Difficult Wheel: Poems (Louise Lindsey Merrick Natural) - Softcover

Adcock, Betty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807120235 ISBN 13: 9780807120231

Publisher: LSU Press, 1995

Synopsis

In The Difficult Wheel, Betty Adcock writes about time, about losing the past yet never being able to lose it. Hers are poems about vanishings, about grief, and about folly―our absurd attempt to cancel time and space, to abstract ourselves out of history and out of nature, and to distract ourselves from death’s specter.

Adcock’s verses fuse formal pattern with the chaos of rapid change, music with grief, the world’s presences―deer, bird, fox, all that shakes the “shuddering loom”―with the absences that time has dreamed and language must confront. Out of her personal losses Adcock imagines the larger ones we are facing at the end of the twentieth century.

But there are celebrations here, too: a simple field of wild flowers on an Aegean island becomes music, memory, a “pearl of great price.” A woman caring for injured birds in her backyard aviary keeps “bits of heaven’s weather, pieces of the sky”―and because of her earthbound love, they will rise.

Arresting language and challenging vision distinguish these poems and this poet.

About this title

About the Author:

Betty Adcock is Kenan Writer-in-Residence at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her previous books of poetry are Walking Out, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; Nettles, winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award; and Beholdings, winner of the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award. She is also the recipient of the James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah magazine.

From Publishers Weekly:

The third section of Adcock's (Beholdings) fourth collection contains several impressive poems. Gently, determined not to disturb those sleeping, she confronts "the whole past/ it was so terribly important that we lose." In "In a Trunk Not Looked Into for Twenty Years," redbud seeds saved by her father bring to mind his painterly eye. In ``The New South'' the poet draws past and present together, contrasting the ancestral quilts handed down in her family, both kept and used, with the antique quilts her friends buy to hang on their walls. Poems in the first two sections seem shallower, less sharply focussed and thought through, with the exception of poems in which the poet identifies with animals--the white rhinoceros caged in a supposedly life-like environment, and the mule: ``Born canceled, he works and balks,/ angry always in the muscle of his unknowing/ himself his only tribe, and that one going.''

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0807120235
• ISBN 13: 9780807120231
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80