The Profile Makers: Poems

ISBN: 0805055355

Author: Bierds, Linda

Condition: Used

Review...a radiant collection... The tightly coiled imagery that distinguishes Bierds's fifth volume of poetry is often as surprising as it is beautiful.... -- The New York Times Book Review, Scott VealeProduct DescriptionA collection of personal poems are linked to one another through lanuage and ideas, in a luminous meditation on immortalityFrom Library JournalBierds's fifth collection (following The Ghost Trio, LJ 9/1/94) will take your breath away. Using interrelated poems to examine the image through various 19th-century technologies developed to capture it, Bierds astonishes with her abilities to build a sustained work of pathos and beauty. first She first presents Matthew Brady's photography through the voice of his assistant's cousin, who relives tragic family events by examining six family portraits taken by Brady. The central image of greenhouse glass?it seems that discarded glass negatives were used as greenhouse windows?is introduced here and recurs throughout, as in the brilliant image that concludes a poem spoken by the aged Dorothy Wordsworth: she recollects a hawk that crashed through several walls of greenhouse glass and "lay in a bloodshawl/ of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass/ on the brick-work floor repeated its image./ Again and again and again./ As all we have passed through sustains us." These difficult poems will reward the patient reader with clarity and beauty. A winner.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New YorkCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.