In this Book
- Bestiary
- Book
- 2009
- Published by: Red Hen Press
summary
"The poems in Elise Paschen's Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world," praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or "Book of Beasts," the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn. The daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers' eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives—marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age—and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.
Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.
Table of Contents
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- Engagement
- pp. 16-17
- Barn Owl and Moon
- p. 20
- Miss Spider’s Guests
- p. 27
- Under Siege
- p. 32
- Warning Signs
- p. 37
- Behind the Swan
- p. 39
- Ghost-Echo
- p. 40
- Disappearing Act
- p. 41
- Solstice in Snow
- p. 42
- Pond in Winter
- p. 43
- Sea-Change
- p. 44
- Squibnocket
- pp. 46-47
- Chancing Upon the Manatees
- pp. 48-49
- Raccoon on a Branch
- pp. 50-51
- The Broken Swan
- pp. 55-56
- Mary of Magdala
- pp. 62-63
- Outside the Tomb
- p. 64
- Under the Dome
- pp. 66-67
- Cradle-Song
- p. 70
- Feast for the Living
- p. 72
- First Snow
- p. 73
- Magnificent Frigatebird
- pp. 74-75
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 77-78
- Biographical Note
- p. 79
Additional Information
ISBN
9781597093729
Related ISBN(s)
9781597091312
MARC Record
OCLC
835770712
Pages
80
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No