Uncertain Grace (Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets) - Softcover

Wee, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591543 ISBN 13: 9781556591549

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Synopsis

Winner of the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets.

Rebecca Wee's award-winning debut is a moody and lyrical mosaic where the reader is presented multiple and simultaneous points of reality. As line after line gathers details from the world, Wee's poems build in momentum, give voice to the silenced, and explore the poet's impulse to create art that transcends suffering.

Rebecca Wee is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. A former editor of The Minnesota Review, she earned her MFA from George Mason University and has received several awards for her poetry.

Pont des Arts

She's bent in a posture of anguish or prayer
in a spot of city filth.

Head down, a stained knit cap
with a few coins on the ground beside her,
and her pliant child, a shadow.

Someone veers past with a friend
in a clamor of rings and scarves. A pretty child
skips after them, scattering pigeons.

The mothers miss how their daughters' eyes catch them--
the wary, openmouthed stares.

A terrible knowledge passes between them,
the bridge rippling under their feet,

before the polished child rushes past but looks back
at the one on the bridge in the heat--

the sunblown silent one
whose hand has pulled back and flown up to smooth,
for a moment, her heavy hair.

The Philosopher

A man rides a bicycle into town. He's forgotten his clothes,
or maybe this is what he means to do.
He rides carefully into the burning town.

Apartments of old stone list, iron balconies, awnings,
the window-grates blacken with heat. He rides by.

His lip perspires, his eyes intent.
In the hills behind him there is a glow that is not the burning.
The Acropolis maybe. The Dome of the Rock.

The man has a book under his arm. The pages are gilt-edged, the title
has worn away. He has a shoulder-wound also, an old crescent scar.
Now his chest sweats, now his abdomen.
He is more agile than laughter.

The road turns. A black sedan rounds the corner
behind him. They are leaving town or they're trailing him.

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Wee is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College, Illinois. She received her MFA from George Mason University, and has received several awards for her poetry. She has served as the editor for the minnesota review and editorial assistant to Carolyn Forche on her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Baudelaire to His Mother

Shall I bring the Châteaubriand or will you wait?
Your letters have been full of the most frightful things;
I shall never get used to them. And here I am,
wandering about with my shawl. The material is lovely
but the antiquity of the design is an invincible obstacle
to its sale.

I must make a lot of money to escape from Paris.
I have neither the courage nor the genius
of Balzac, yet I have all the complications
that made him so wretched. You see dear mother,
I am in a fairly grave condition for a man
whose profession is to produce and clothe
creatures of the imagination.

The right leg is swollen, and cannot be bent and the pain
is exceedingly strange; some say it is cramp, others neuralgia.
Opium has terrible inconveniences.
But come at once you say.

Do I need a change of air? I cannot tell. Is it my sick body
that weakens my will and mind or is it
a spiritual cowardice wears out my body?
I beg you not to send me phrases

such as these: To speak truly—Charles, you made me despair! or
A careful man has always enough money by him to meet such things.

REFUSE ME SIMPLY, OR SEND THE MONEY.

I have an intolerable fear of poverty.

What I feel is an immense discouragement, a sensation of
unbearable isolation, a perpetual fear of some remote disaster,

an utter disbelief in my capacity,

a total absence of desire.

An impossibility of finding any kind of interest.

The strange success of my book
and the hatred it roused interested me for a little,
but afterwards I fell back again.

I send you some articles printed about Les Fleurs du Mal,
by various nobodies. But my abominable existence
and brandy, which I am going to stop, have impaired my stomach
these last months, and besides,
I have nervous crises, exactly like a woman.

REFUSE ME SIMPLY, OR SEND THE MONEY.

Obsessed by moments of longing to sleep eternally, yet now
I cannot sleep at all, my mind is so busy. Why should I add
that I went through the winter fireless?
It is too stupid.

I scrawl most fearfully.

My clothes are quite adequate. The fifty francs (!)
are maternal, but the handkerchiefs are a stroke of genius.

I am in a pitiable state of mind and body; so bad
that I envy everyone. If ever a man were ill with an illness
medicine cannot cure, I am that man.

I have an intolerable fear of poverty though my clothes
are quite adequate.

I ask myself unceasingly: what is the good of this?

Accursed festivals reminding us of the flight of time;
how badly we use it; how full of sorrow it is.

I am riddled with affairs and worries. I do not refer to them
as that would hurt you unnecessarily.

I scrawl most fearfully.

Do you want your Châteaubriand now or will you wait?

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1556591543
• ISBN 13: 9781556591549
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96