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Printed Work

 

Gone To Earth

by- Eleanor Wilner

Gone to Earth brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems—an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them—new life seeded out of a decaying order: “a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.” Written during the poet’s immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

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How To Feed A Horse

by- Janice Dewey

How to Feed a Horse is a manuscript in three parts: One, “Ranch Poems,” activities, contemplations, awareness of the creek environment. Two, “Numerology,” disparate poems that invite us to consider the absurd in our language, politics, history, and human relationships. Three, “Her(e),” conversations with a network of women, some imagined, some historic, some intimate. The author’s preoccupations with climate change and our deteriorating planetary environment surface as she gives herself over to be witness to the landscape, its decline and perseverance, its glory and rich legacy. The poems are also love poems; they show the ecstasy and shock of the now.

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What People Are Saying

  • Karen Brennan
    How to Feed a Horse conjures the extraordinary beauty of a certain diminishing but surviving West. Dusty hills, canyon wrens, scurrying quail, horses, “biting flies,” the ranch, the tree, the sky—all are memorialized in these meticulously observed, beautifully crafted poems. Dewey’s remarkable first book is a testimony to the power of the lyric to “crack . . . language alive with memory holes,” to make us look again and think again at what we may be losing, what may already be lost. So smart, so moving!
    Karen Brennan
    author of little dark
  • Eleanor Wilner
    What a deep delight to discover the poetry of Janice Dewey—a distinctive voice with attitude—wry, original, resonant; hairpin turns of phrase: “journey looking for the carnal door to weightlessness again;” inner and outer magically confounded: “her head out in the hurricane of consciousness.” Her poems uncannily trans-scribe—writing feelingly across the arbitrary border between humans and the rest of nature: “prone on the ground an event of sincere gratitude,” and, with the coyote: “ears prickled, giant sound receptors for desert wisdom.”
    Eleanor Wilner
    recipient of the Robert Frost Medal and the MacArthur Fellowship
  • Alicia Ostriker

    Haunted by history, grounded by mountains and rivers, irradiated by myth, torn between rage and the love of life, made enchanting by the voluptuous music of its language, Wilner’s early poetry is lit with insight from within. In a poem defending the uses of myth, there’s a scene where “silent / women in outdated robes walk slowly, / as figures move through centuries, / like the memory of patience.” Oh, but there’s Marianne Moore, and a bit to her left, there’s Muriel Rukeyser. Wilner is factual, prophetic, and a shaman for our times.

    Alicia Ostriker
    author of Waiting for the Light
  • Cynthia Hogue
    The distinguished poet Eleanor Wilner is widely celebrated for the chiseled elegance of her verse and the breadth of her vision. Wilner can sizzle with outrage as she exposes the sordid roots of violence and greed, or distill the substance of critical mythopoesis into essential poetry. We see qualities in the early poetry collected in this volume—the profound ethical sensibility, the meticulous observations of nature and society, the stringent wit—that will come to define this great poet’s mature work. In these sparkling poems, we discover her fierce compassion in incipient form. And in the trenchant personal poem (“What do myths have to do with the price of fish?”), we glimpse the patronization that an aspiring young poet coming of age in the middle of the last century confronted as she made her way. Gone to Earth is a beautiful gift of a book!
    Cynthia Hogue
    author of In June the Labyrinth