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Title details for Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss - Available

Modern Poetry

Poems

by Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss
Audiobook
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Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 10, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781696616409
      • File size: 76164 KB
      • Duration: 02:38:40

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 18, 2023
      Seuss (Frank: Sonnets) lends her mordant wit and incisive vision to this poetry-focused sixth collection. Her deadpan levity refuses piousness, even as she deals head-on with a feeling of being “never again at home in the world” and a sense that “I have camped/ at this outpost my whole life.” Seuss’s comic talent bristles and undercuts sentimentality. She comments as she goes, often on the very construction and thoughts which drive her “breathless/ deathless, feckless little song.” There is an urge toward self-laceration in these pages (“I looked like a Rubens/ painting of a woman half-eaten/ by moths”), but she applies these same unsparing, scalpel-like strokes to “the murdered world” and to poetry itself. There are several essayistic poems discussing craft and the artistry of verse: “There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope,” she notes, while refusing to settle for easy platitude. “Who wants anyone/ else’s hands on their pain?” she asks, challenging simplistic self-help solutions. “Don’t be the savior, be the stain.” These irreverent, pulsing, and defiant poems are full of dangerous good sense.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss reads her own work at a stately pace. Some listeners may find this hard to get used to, but it gives them the opportunity to think about the poems, rather than just experiencing them. They are a portrait of the author--who she is and how she became that person. Her love of Keats (the man and his work) is a theme, and the title poem is a survey of some of the greats of modern poetry and how she and her own poetry relate to them. Seuss's narration reveals her understanding of the emotional content of her work and how to convey that to listeners. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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