In this Book
- Spar
- Book
- 2002
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
- Series: Iowa Poetry Prize
summary
Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. iii-iv
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- Create Desire
- p. 1
- Shrewd star
- p. 3
- If it be event
- p. 6
- What, I said
- p. 10
- There comes a time
- p. 11
- What we know
- p. 12
- Kiss Me Deadly
- pp. 13-14
- O verb, o void.
- p. 15
- Lady of the lake
- p. 16
- August could ask
- p. 17
- Yellow drapes
- p. 18
- Although the paths
- p. 19
- There was a stare
- p. 20
- And when the nights
- p. 21
- It could be a bird
- p. 22
- Or would triumph
- p. 24
- Octaves, ovations
- p. 25
- The first greeting
- p. 26
- I was watching
- p. 27
- Now I promise
- p. 28
- When kiss spells
- p. 29
- He deciphers
- p. 32
- Tender feather
- p. 33
- Yes the red flower
- p. 34
- A story left
- p. 35
- I never wish to
- p. 36
- Shadow of a Doubt
- p. 38
- The rain falls
- p. 39
- Winter Abstract
- p. 40
- A light says why
- p. 41
- The end of the day
- p. 43
- Implorers, connivers
- p. 44
- What I meet of
- p. 45
- And the urge is less
- p. 46
- They make it go
- p. 48
- I have a friend
- p. 49
- To take, to make
- p. 50
- Lost he says
- p. 52
- Heroic Roses
- pp. 53-54
- No noise subtracts
- p. 55
- I believe there is
- p. 56
- We did things
- p. 57
Additional Information
ISBN
9781587294167
Related ISBN(s)
9780877458074
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
56109561
Pages
72
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2002