Passages: Poems

ISBN: 0807120502

Author: Brosman, Catharine Savage

Condition: New

About the Author Catharine Savage Brosman, who now lives in Houston, is professor emerita of French at Tulane University. She is the author of numerous books of French literary history and criticism, two volumes of nonfiction prose, and seven collections of poetry, including most recently Range of Light and Breakwater. Product Description In Passages, Catharine Savage Brosman presents journeys between the world and spirit, journeys that share an axis of yearning for a realm as pure as desire. Brosman refracts through metrical virtuosity, historical imagination, and a vision like cleansing light a world alive with coruscating color and sensual textures.Each line is subtle, quiet, yet breathtaking in its precision, and the spare eloquence of Brosmans perfectly executed gestures invests with stunning pathos poems such as Wind-which reflects a woman abandoned by husband, children, and faith itself-and Carnival, in which a lonely aging woman at Mardi Gras muses.Whether rendering a speakers spiritual communion with Mozart, the febrile longings of a woman caught in adultery in French Algeria, or a love letter by Madame dEpinay (deftly couched in the metrics and tropes of eighteenth-century France), Brosman moves effortlessly from the broodingly intimate perspectives of other eyes, other souls, to the most abstract of aesthetic meditations.These are poems of wit and passion, poems that beg to be read and reread, and this remarkable collection reminds us again and again of the passages that open into the lives of our imagination. Review Catharine Savage Brosmans language succeeds in being at once traditional and modern, temporal and intemporal. Her poems evoke and translate Nature as well as the motions of the body, the heart, and the mind. . . . In her words one finds the flavor of oysters, mushrooms, lemons, asparagus, and artichokes. One meets the fragrance of things, the secrets of beings, and the symbols that they then become for her and for us. Her work is an acknowledgment and a deciphering. -- Jean-Claude Renard Recipient of the Grand Prize for Poetry from the Acadmie Franaise From the Back Cover In Passages Catharine Brosman presents journeys between the world and spirit, journeys that share an axis of yearning for a realm as pure as desire.