A bold poetic intervention into the pastoral tradition.
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.
About author(s): ELIZABETH WILLIS is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.
She is the author of three previous volumes of poetry, including The Human Abstract (1995), a National Poetry Series selection, and lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
| Author(s) | Elizabeth |
|---|
Wesleyan University Press Meteoric flowers, paperback/elizabeth willis
