Description: Happiness, Jonathan Swift wrote, is the quality of being well-deceived. In this long-awaited second collection, Maggie Dietz investigates our sometimes near-sighted notions of happiness, interweaving loss and motherhood, the death of a parent, and the persistence of hope, in poems that are characteristically sharp-eyed, varied, and evocative. Her first book published in the series did unusually well, with positive reviews in prominent publications. In this new collection, Dietz does what Phoenix Poets poets do best: write beautiful poems on difficult subjects, looking head-on at problems and situations that a clever turn in a poetic line won t necessarily solve. The book is, in the words of one of our readers, a bracing, various pleasure to read. "
Brief description:
Maggie Dietz is the author of Perennial Fall, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Americans' Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, and An Invitation to Poetry. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Review Quotes: "Just ordinary everyday experiences. Death, for instance, oh and a child gets his fingers acetoned by a toothbrush for trying to help a wounded expiring bird, its 'Black eyes visible through skeins / of lids, ' its 'soft pink belly like a clam.' And there's the 'gossamer ice' of a frozen river, like 'bright / metal hammered fine as the / ghost of the ghost of a moon.' And the birth of a baby, 'every one / of its live cells singing / Hosanna for "we praise / you" and "please save / us" as being trains its / way into the lighted room. . . .' Things like that. Everyday instances. All these extraordinary human things, the pleasure and the pain, sung about in a versification which is a radiant celebratory light shining on them."--David Ferry