Eleanor Wilner – författare

Eleanor Wilner loosens the attachments of traditional figures to the old historical ground and sets them free--to suggest how it might have been otherwise, and might still be. This is the most important book yet from the acclaimed poet and MacArthur prize winner. "Otherwise is ambitious and patient, built on the spider's stratagem: the poet throws out a long tentative thread, then spins carefully outward until we see the new shape standing on air."--Carol Muske, The New York Times Book Review "In a book of poems, one is happy to find half a dozen remarkable performances--poems worth rereading and even committing to memory. In Otherwise--which is splendid from the title on--it would be hard to find half a dozen which failed to equal Wilner's stratospheric standard."--David Slavit, Seven Arts

The venture of this inviting collection is to look, from the many vantages that the 35 poets in this eclectic anthology chose to look, at what it was—knowing that a poem can’t be conceived in advance of its creation—that helped their poems to emerge or connected them over time. The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry permits an inside view of how poets outwit internal censors and habits of thought, showing how the meticulous and the spontaneous come together in the process of discovery. Within are contained the work and thoughts of:Betty AdcockJoan AleshireDebra AllberyElizabeth ArnoldDavid BakerRick BarotMarianne BoruchKaren BrennanGabrielle CalvocoressiMichael CollierCarl DennisStuart DischellRoger FanningChris ForhanReginald GibbonsLinda GregersonJennifer GrotzBrooks HaxtonTony HoaglandMark JarmanA. Van JordanLaura KasischkeMary LeaderDana LevinJames LongenbachThomas LuxMaurice ManningHeather McHughMartha RhodesAlan ShapiroDaniel TobinEllen Bryant VoigtAlan WilliamsonEleanor WilnerC. Dale Young

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetryBefore Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air—a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetryBefore Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air—a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

From What It Hinges On ...a letter here, a sentence there, years of work litter the field that lies outside the town that flood or fire took back, as the great tectonic plates grind out their harmonies below the sea, and the earth turns in its restless sleep, spun by what we cannot see, the hand that is no hand, but brings us calm to think it so, and think it ours to smite our enemies, forgetting as we turn it to a fist, it is ourselves curled, blind as newborn kittens, in the palm. Eleanor Wilner's poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry. As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint.The poems describe 'a sordid drama' in which the players wear 'eyeless masks', and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving 'the art that' in both senses 'keeps nothing at bay', swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope.