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 (born May 12, 1945) is a contemporary American poet, visual artist, and frequent translator from the French. She received her M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. A Canadian by birth, Norma Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977. For nearly twenty years, Norma Cole's work has received great acclaim for her: "openness to traditions and practices, artists and writings, radically divergent from her own". Recently, she collaborated with The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at SFSU in honor of their fiftieth anniversary. There she helped to create a site-specific gallery installation titled Collective Memory which opened on December 11, 2004 and ran through April 16, 2005. The project was described as: Among other awards, she is the recipient of the Gerbode Poetry Prize and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. "The Poetics of Vertigo"--delivered as the 1998 "George Oppen Memorial Lecture"---won the Robert D. Richardson NonFiction Award. With Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins she won the Purchase Award for the photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize".