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by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Author)
In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt's astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of "a quintessential American elegist" (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review).
From "Apple Tree"O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three,
this one, this one life.
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Praise for Ellen Bryant Voigt
"Reading Voigt one comes to understand that what we think of as reality is the product of both painstaking observation and imagination.... She favors a language that is both precise and lush, and a narrative that is both immediately accessible and richly layered with meaning."
-- Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
"Voigt has a highly tempered poetic intelligence, most obvious in her line by line determination to align evocative images with their emotional incentives."
-- Sven Birkerts, New York Times Book Review
"[Voigt is a] genius. She is a poet of knowledge, and knowledge in the living, messy world."
-- Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World
"Ellen Bryant Voigt has fashioned an art of passionate gravity and opulent music, an art at once ravishing and stern and deeply human."
-- Academy Award in Literature citation, American Academy of Arts and Letters
"The beauty and intensity of Ellen Bryant Voigt's sustained elegy leaves us feeling much as we do after listening to Mozart's Requiem: grief-stricken, transformed, and exalted."
-- Francine Prose
"Voigt's poems are shorn of superfluity, each line shaved down to its essential, burning core. She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy--an elegy defined most strikingly by her devotion to unsentimental self-interrogation and her equally unflinching assessments of public life."
-- Martin Mitchell, Poetry Daily
