Description: The poems of Take Nothing are embedded in connections to family and landscape, to memory and possibility. They especially explore and distill those indelible, sometimes small, moments that cumulatively shape the arc of a life. These can be as surprising as the visitation of a hawk and as significant as the death of a parent. In a voice that ranges from the wry to the revelatory, and from mourning to celebration, Deborah Pope's poems speak with lyrical precision and deep experience.
Brief description:
Deborah Pope has published four books of poetry--Fanatic Heart, Mortal World, Falling Out of the Sky, and Take Nothing. Her collection, Fanatic Heart, was re-issued in the Classic Contemporary Series from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, EPOCH, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poetry Northwest. She has also been awarded the Robinson Jeffers Prize.
Review Quotes: "Pope's Take Nothing is a triumph. Opening with 'Threshold, ' a series of memorable epigrams preparing the way for the turns and configurations of the book's central concerns, the collection is remarkable in its range, its variety and its careful focus. Poems like 'Appearances, ' which is a walk through a midwestern department store, are whittled fine as wire, a whole family's struggles contained. An elegy for 'The Next to Last Howard Johnson's' is priceless, funny, and poignant. The title poem showcases this poet's incredible attention to lyric detail and foreshadows the darker poems in the second section's themes of loss, regret, and painful learning. The final section is full of celebration, yet touched with knowledge of frailty. It ends with the ambitious longer poem, 'The Dream of Eadfrith, ' in the voice of the monk who illuminated the Lindisfarne Gospels on an island in the eighth century. The story he tells is heavy with toil, gossamer, and beautiful as the flora and fauna of that remote place. Take Nothing speaks a singing free verse, lush with crime and echo. Like time. Like music."--Betty Adcock, author of Rough Fugue