Description
Review Agoos has the courage to write plainly but the writing is never dull. Her language is simple, sensuous, and concrete, with a quiet lyricism that approaches radiance. -- The Partisan ReviewFraming her travel pieces in American pine, weaving her home truths so openly that the European figures glimmer through, Julie Agoos gives us the best of both worlds. The sincerity, lightness, and composure make her voice remarkable. -- James Merrill Product Description The title of Julie Agoos' book Calendar Year is taken from one of the four longer works that make up this collection: these five or six lines/once sketched on the leatherbound notepad; your signature -- / a backwards ghost; the fingerprints/ that had belonged to you/ are bodiless and painful/ as an idea/ just out of grasp (from the final lines of the title section). Abandonment relates a similar concern for the intangibility and temporality of being: and last, the black vase sheer and difficult/that stinks of its own reason: we are temporal./ Every inward chance/ breaks free of us. From Publishers Weekly Evoking the year's seasons and its cycles, four sectioned, narrative poems fill this richly contoured, yet frustratingly oblique volume by Agoos (who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for Above the Land). Agoos structures the first-person poems around images of the speaker's lonely, elderly father (whose brain damage is disclosed only towards the book's end) and ruminations on his landscape paintings of country settings strewn with abandoned houses and barns. A tactile and exacting style ("the swell of wordlessness, the fluid wound/ that pressed against the surface with no sound") combines with Agoos's private symbology and overwrought storytelling to distance the reader. Only in "Rumour," a hypnotic piece giving voice to the minor Greek deity ("I am attached to distance and the clear voice,/ the broken images of world and world"), does her narrative montage coalesce into a gratifying-and accessible-poetic whole. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Publisher 6 x 9 trim. LC 96-27457 About the Author JULIE AGOOS won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for her book Above the Land. She has taught at John Hopkins and Princeton University, and currently teaches in the Department of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
