Poetry. This book of new poems by a modern master of the found and formulated, and an important translator, is divided into three sequences: "Pluto's Disgrace," "In Our Own Backyard," and "Collective Memory." Music controls the tone--"Here from the tap the heart beats"--as everyday life takes place under a political specter. The universe is taken as greater frame, allowing a human place. In the second section, prose intervenes, then back in the third to verbal play lightening the script. As the poet puts it: lessness. Personal, global, universal: all three shift and interlock in repeating cadences in these poems. Their lock on reality provides consolation for these times.

Author Hometown: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA



About the author: Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her recent poetry publications include 14000 FACTS, NATURAL LIGHT, WHERE SHADOWS WILL: SELECTED POEMS 1988-2008, SPINOZA IN HER YOUTH, and SCOUT, a text/image work in CD-ROM format. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert's NOTEBOOKS, 1956-1978, Anne Portugal's NUDE and CROSSCUT UNIVERSE: WRITING ON WRITING FROM FRANCE. She created 2004-6 Collective Memory, an installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," California Historical Society, San Francisco, CA. Cole has received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Nonfiction Award, as well as awards from the Fund for Poetry. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for over twenty years.