Keeping My Name (Walt McDonald First-Book Series)

ISBN: 0896725294

Author: Tufariello, Catherine

Condition: Used

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004"In immaculate, subtly musical meter and rhyme, Tufariello conjures scenes of the city, modern history, marriage and family, love in the Italian Renaissance, and the women of the Bible that fully engage the mind and the heart."-Booklist"For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . .what excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity."-Camille-Yvette Welsch, ForeWord Magazine"Tufariello ranges widely in form and subject, all with such aplomb that no less an expert than Richard Wilbur praises her 'plain, supple eloquence' and 'easy command of rhyme, measure, and form.' . . . Resourcefulness and restraint are rare qualities in contemporary poetry. By the former, I mean the ability to find new ways to approach topics that others have done, new ways to put traditional forms through their paces. As for the latter quality, Tufariello's poems provide such eloquent examples that I feel no need to explain further."-R. S. Gwynn, The Hudson Review"The poet addresses lovers lost and gained, children not yet born, and friends who have left her too early. . . . Several poems in this collection [take] the breath away. . . . It is unusual for a modern poet to use rhyme so deftly and dangerously. These poems have an addictive rhythm."-Hartford CourantKeeping My Name bears the stamp of an assured poet whose work has long appeared in major journals and anthologies. Though Tufariello is known in New Formalist circles as one of the most accomplished younger poets working in meter and rhyme, her poems will appeal broadly to readers of contemporary poetry. With a distinctive blend of craft and deep feeling, clarity and subtle thought, Tufariello gives new resonance to the historical and mythic past by drawing larger significance and universal themes from contemporary life.Keeping My Name reflects a particular interest in and compassion for the lives of women, past and present. Its five sections offer a variety of repasts. One brings women of the Old and New Testaments to life with freshness and immediacy. Another traces the dissolution of a marriage; a third, the experience-rarely represented in poetry-of infertility and its high-tech treatment. Many poems are personal, but none merely confessional. At center, counterpoising the contemporary poems of love and grief, is a series of translations from Petrarch and other classic Italian love poets.Tufariellos poems address loss and longing, yet discover joy in everyday things-a walrus being fed at an aquarium, a small girl dancing at a wedding, a basketball game on a city playground. Her warmth, tempered by wit, is void of sentimentality. Readers who appreciate well-made, accessible, and memorable poems will find much to savor here.Catherine Tufariellos enchanting and warmly crafted poems celebrate, to use her phrase, small ordinary decencies. More important, they show how such decencies nourish the faith that we are, individually and collectively, capable of progress, fulfillment, and redemption. Mixing personal reflection, Biblical myth, and history, this book is a remarkable debut by one of our very finest younger poets.-Timothy SteeleFrom The Walrus at Coney Island:All watchers gasp together as he dives,The clumsy fore fins clever now as knives,The dark head bobbing in the dazzling sprayOf sun-shot water, like a childs at play.So this is what he is, has always been-A gleaming, sleekly muscled submarine,Lithe as a dancer, roguish as a boy,Corkscrewing downward with what looks like joy.