This new book by award-winning author Amy Newman explores as its formal structure the 72 definitions for the word "fall." These lovely, accessible poems span a narrative drama-from the creation of the world and the subsequent exile of its first inhabitants, through the downward movement of the human body in its surrender to illness and the world's gravitational pull, to the beauty in the descent of spent foliage in autumn.
Each definition of"fall" engenders its own poem, and the definitions serve as poem titles. Section one explores the theological sense of The Fall, and section two focuses on the present world, addressing how the blemish of that Fall-real or imagined, religious or cultural-exists in us as homesickness, physical illness, and domestic and spiritual dissolution. The third section attends to the very gesture of defining, of finding ways to name and live in a world where both the landscape and the language are vividly alive yet saturated with memory and loss.
- ISBN10 0819567094
- ISBN13 9780819567093
- Publish Date 3 September 2006 (first published 27 October 2004)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher University Press of New England
- Imprint Wesleyan University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 84
- Language English