"My first and last companions,
grief and rage,
defeated, dwindle down to candle ends
in hammered sconces Faith, the kitchen drudge,
forgot to douse. They blink contentedly
beside the crawling tankard and the crumbs."
- from "The
Consolation of Boethius"
This previously unpublished
collection was written between the publication
of the author's memoir in 1995 and her latest
book of poetry,
Fifty-Two. The same appetite for rich
language and for the ornaments of nature that
the poet put on display in her first collection
has here been tempered by years of experience
and emotional injury.
The spirit of the sylph who
delighted in language and youth through the pages
of The
Squanicook Eclogues has aged, and suffered,
"middle-aged Daphne caught in Dante’s
silvery, arthritic, suicidal wood."
Several poems in this collection
have been published previously in literary journals.
"The Consolation of Boethius" appeared
in the Paris
Review, and was chosen by Mark Strand
to be included in Best Poems of 1991.
"Daphne in Mourning" appeared in the
New
York Review of Books, as did a translation
of Joseph Brodsky’s poem "Flight to
Egypt" which later appeared in Nativity
Poems(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).
About the author
Melissa Green is the recipient
of both the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry
Society of America and the Lavan Award from the
Academy of American Poets. She is the author of
three books: The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton, 1988), Color
is the Suffering of Light (Norton, 1995),
andFifty-two
(Arrowsmith, 2007). She has recently finished
Akeldama, a book-length lyrical work
about Heloïse and Abélard. Her poems
have appeared in journals including The
New Republic, AGNI
and the inaugural issue of Little
Star.
