Ellen Bryant Voigt – författare

To witness the maturation of a poet over time is one of the great pleasures of reading. Here Ellen Bryant Voigt gives us that narrative distilled and amplified, arranging selections from six previous volumes to culminate in transcendent recent poems.

Human character and human destiny—will and fate—pervade Ellen Voigt’s work, giving her poems of relationship, her exploration of an individual past, rare depth and power. Now, in her fourth collection, a sustained meditation infuses the work, examining the myth of self, the human compulsion to remedy or augment fortune, and the limits of “what’s given and what’s made from luck and will.” Where will and fate collide is what chiefly occupies Voigt.

In this mosaic of sonnets, her fifth collection, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a little-recorded event that killed 25 million worldwide, half a million in America alone. The Nation calls Kyrie "an astonishing collection . . . so spare and tightly woven, yet so mindful of the cadences of the speaking voice, that the poems read like verse drama."Starting with the family, Voigt creates voices that gather into one vast community story, a "true tour de force" (Boston Sunday Globe) that speaks to our own time of plague.

Following her stringent and much-acclaimed Kyrie, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ellen Bryant Voigt now examines more intimately the ordeals and exaltations of everyday life. Nature, both fierce and benign, infuses this collection, furthering "an art at once ravishing and stern and deeply human" (American Academy of Arts and Letters).

To witness the maturation of a poet over time is one of the great pleasures of reading. Here Ellen Bryant Voigt gives us that narrative distilled and amplified, arranging selections from six previous volumes to culminate in transcendent recent poems.

Rash yet tender, chastened yet lush, Headwaters is a book of opposites, a book of wild abandon by one of the most formally exacting poets of our time. Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviours has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless—that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don’t you think I’m doing better," asks the first poem. "You got sick you got well you got sick," says the last.Eschewing punctuation, forgoing every symmetry, the poems hurl themselves forward, driven by an urgent need to speak. Headwaters is a book of wisdom that refuses to be wise, a book of fresh beginnings by an American poet writing at the height of her powers.

The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers has emerged as one of the most well-respected writing programs in the country, producing a generation of first-rate poets who are also deeply dedicated teachers of their art. Poets Teaching Poets collects essays by current and former lecturers at Warren Wilson, including acclaimed poets Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alan Williamson, Eleanor Wilner, and Renate Wood.This passionate and provocative anthology presents an extended, insightful dialogue on an astonishing range of topics: writers from Homer, Dickinson, and Akhmatova to Bishop, O'Hara, Milosz, and Plath; meditations on the nature of the image and the discovery of the self in Greek verse; a passionate defense of lyric poetry; and other engaging themes. Whatever their subject, these essays are, at the core, passionate and thoughtful meditations on the place of poetry in contemporary culture.Poets Teaching Poets will be an invaluable tool for teachers and students of poetry and poetics at every level. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between craft and the larger issues of art, and in the continuing and exciting relevance of poetry today.Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia. Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Poems devoted to family and the physical world.

These nine eloquent and skillfully crafted essays by a distinguished poet examine the art of lyric poetry in all aspects of its design and structure. Through attentive readings of a variety of artists, including her contemporaries, Ellen Bryant Voigt celebrates the structure and elasticity of lyric poems. She argues for reading as a writer reads—with equal parts passion and analysis. Her analyses of the effects of tone, image, voice, and structure connect brilliant theory with tangible examples.Intimate as well as informative, the collection begins with a discussion of the creative process and Voigt's fascination with the writing of Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop. Readings of lyric poems by Shakespeare, Sidney, Poe, Stevens, Williams, Larkin, Bogan, Roethke, Plath, Levertov, Berryman, and others demonstrate the roles of gender, point of view, image, and music in poetry. An experienced teacher, Voigt focuses on the lyric but encourages, in any study of poetry, original thinking, attention to structure, and, above all, close reading of the work itself. An intelligent and thought-provoking marriage of art and scholarship, The Flexible Lyric exemplifies, with fierceness, dedication, and precision, how the making of poems is not just a trade but a calling.

In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence and meticulous observation of nature, history and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin(1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review).From “Apple Tree”O my soul,it is not a small thing,to have made from three,this one, this one life.