A poet of "epic perception" and "subtle music," Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization -- a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality "saturated with being" in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/24/2013
ISBN: 9780811220910
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.40d
Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist
Review Citations: Library Journal 04/15/2013 pg. 83
Publishers Weekly 05/27/2013
New York Times Book Review 12/29/2013 pg. 22
New York Times Book Review 01/05/2014 pg. 21