In this Book
- Meteoric Flowers
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Wesleyan University Press
Elizabeth Willis's new collection is a stunning collision of the pastoral tradition with the politics of the post-industrial age. These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world—mutability, desire, and the flowering of things—they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.
Table of Contents
- Sympathetic Inks
- p. 4
- Her Mossy Couch
- p. 5
- The Steam Engine
- p. 7
- The Nettle
- p. 8
- Devil Bush
- p. 14
- Verses Omitted
- pp. 17-19
- Verses Omitted
- p. 19
- Irritative Fevers
- p. 25
- The Skirt of Night
- p. 26
- Diana's Trees
- p. 29
- Her Bright Career
- p. 30
- Expiring Groans
- p. 32
- Buds and Bulbs
- p. 35
- VERSES OMITTED BY MISTAKE
- pp. 37-39
- The Portland Vase
- p. 44
- Oil and Water
- p. 45
- Tiptoe Lightning
- p. 47
- The Ghost of Hamlet
- p. 50
- Near and More Near
- p. 51
- Solar Volcanos
- p. 55
- Immortal Sire
- p. 66
- Plundering Honey
- p. 67
- One Great Tide
- p. 69
- In Flowers Concealed
- p. 71
- Accidental Breezes
- p. 72
- The Earth's Nucleus
- p. 73
- Primeval Islands
- p. 74
- Ferns, Mosses, Flags
- p. 75
- Note on the Text
- p. 77
- Acknowledgments
- p. 79