Reversing the Spell (e-book) (used book) | Eleanor Wilner | bookbook.eu

Description

Although she has recently won the prestigious MacArthur prize, Wilner still remains relatively unknown to readers of poetry. This work anthologizes poems from four of her previous volumes and adds new poems written between 1993 and 1996. Few other poets writing now show Wilner's intellectual curiosity and range: bats, goddesses, Asian art, photography, and the politics of the body all have their turns here. Her manner is conversational and digressive; the easy categories of lyric or narrative do not describe her work effectively. She invests old stories with new meaning, as in "Leda's Handmaiden" or "Iphigenia, Setting the Record Straight"; she has a profoundly nuanced sense of the poet's mission, as in "The Messenger," "running through history...[carrying] a code/ only the heart could break." She seems at her best when her manner is half-satirical, as in "How To Get in the Best Magazines," "Preferred:/ tired little poems, taut,/ world-weary," or in her portrait of the poets' Muse, "the big broad...ethereal as hell." Wilner's verse is not principally musical, pleasing the mind more than the ear, but she ought to find an audience among most readers of poetry.

Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
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