Penguin Poets
6 total works
Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life's difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of "Conversations with Evening," Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor.
Ann Lauterbach is one of America’s most innovative and provocative poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous and intellectually charged poems. In this, her ninth book of poems, Lauterbach pursues longstanding inquiries into how language forms and informs our understanding of the relation between empirical observation and subjective response; worldly attachment and inwardness; the given and the chosen. The poems set out not so much to find cogent resolutions to these fluid dyads as to open them to the fact of unknowing that is at the core of all human curiosity and desire. A central prose section tracks along a meditative edge, engaging the risky task of opening the mind to the limits of apprehension; the final section evokes, in the figure of the instructor, the essential contemporary question of how information becomes knowledge.
Things are incidental
Someone is weeping
I weep for the incidental
The days are beautiful
Tomorrow was yesterday
The days are beautiful
Since the mid-1970s, Ann Lauterbach has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, loss and the unexpected (the title poem was written directly in response to witnessing the events of 9/11) play against the reassurances of repetition and narrative story. By turns elegant, fierce, and sensuous, her musically charged poems move from the pictorial or imagistic to a heightened sense of the aural or musical in order to depict the world humming with vibrations of every kind from every source—the world as a form of life.
A new collection of vivid, personal and provocative work from the author of Or to Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry
In Ann Lauterbach’s eleventh collection, the image of a Door recurs across several poems, as she considers the perpetual dialogue between what is open and what is shut for each of us. The Door is a threshold between the inner landscape of memory, thought, imagination and dream and the outer so-called real world, which increasingly comes to us through technology’s lens, displacing and distorting our sense of intimacy, presence and relation. What is near, and what is far away? She asks about the efficacy of language itself, when confronted by the urgent uncertainties of contemporary experience.