William Carlos Williams Award winner
In The Oval Hour Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language鈥攚hich is to say the vulnerability of our reality鈥攚hen we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of "Confessions," twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. 鈥淧assing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence鈥: these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of carnal and metaphysical identities.
鈥淭here is an overtone of Christina Rossetti in these poems, partly discernible in the hindered devotions of the 'Confessions' series and partly in the unresisted sensuality of the poems about (largely) women. 'Two Sisters' is the most disconcerting poem in this line since Goblin Market. Peirce has emotional authority and intellectual passion鈥攁n inevitable triumph.鈥濃擱ichard Howard
鈥淭he poems are inspired by loss in the middle of life and the relationship of this loss to desire. What is most distinctive, however, about Peirce's struggle with the carnal is the way in which the inanimate world reveals the spiritual. Objects in time, in dream, in memory鈥'a dress fastened to a tree,' 'a soldier with a vase inside'鈥攖ake on a vivid architectural quality that converges with her odd phrasing and direct, philosophical approach to result in an image that is nearly fused with the meditation. This book does not sound like anything else being written today.鈥濃Boston Review
Promesa
He will not take fire in his hands
because his hands are fire. When
he prays, sudden birdsong
transmogrifies the bladed places
fire makes of itself into an expectation
for retort. All failures move this way,
though one is left with, if alone, a sight
for images. Songbird on a brown-
black branch among the ochre-
charcoal atmospheres. Burnt sienna,
pitch. Tan and jet. Sparrow, for whom
do you sing other than your likenesses?
