Daphne

Kristen Case lives in Maine. She is the author of the poetry collections Little Arias and Principles of Economics. She won the Maine Literary Award in Poetry for both collections. She is also the author of scholarly essays and books on American literature, most recently Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar.

"Illuminated by a daring and brilliant “alphabetical light,” Daphne by Kristen Case reveals “tree-life” as a “shivering and light-saturated language,” one where “possibilities of leaf-light are layered into a picture of infinity.” Dazzlingly erudite and intimately lyrical, Case’s poems embody a philosophy of desire within the embrace of the human imagination, one where the poet reconfigures trauma and memory. Daphne also explores the artistic realm of ekphrasis in an astute reading of Bernini’s statue of Daphne and Apollo while engaging in thoughtful dialogue with sister poems like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Offering notes on classical aesthetics interwoven with gorgeous seaweed wrack “inking” the Maine coast, this tree-lined book of laurels offers the radiant, mythological transformations of our daily lives: “In the moment love is consumed by its machinery, personhood slips out and seals itself in wood.”"

• “Whoso List to Hunt” 1Hind 2Daphne 3Tonic 15On Certainty 16Tonic 35Horror Vacui 36Tonic 40Unravish’d 41Tonic 55Plenum 56Six Variations on Beethoven’s Opus 109 57Night Sea 63Early/Often 64O 65Tonic 68Late Spring 69Arks of Reprieve 70Ritual 71Plenum with Void 72The Invisible Country of Remade Desire 73