Product Description
2005 Poets' Prize * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004 For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . . . What excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity.” ForeWord. In immaculate, subtly musical meter and rhyme, Tufariello conjures scenes of the city, modern history, marriage and family, love in the Italian Renaissance, and the women of the Bible that fully engage the mind and the heart.” Booklist. Tufariello ranges widely in form and subject, all with such aplomb that no less an expert than Richard Wilbur praises her plain, supple eloquence’ and easy command of rhyme, measure, and form.’ . . . Resourcefulness and restraint are rare qualities in contemporary poetry. . . . Tufariello’s poems provide such eloquent examples that I feel no need to explain further.” R. S. Gwynn, The Hudson Review. With a distinctive blend of craft and deep feeling, clarity and subtle thought, Catherine Tufariello gives new resonance to the historical and mythic past by drawing larger significance and universal themes from contemporary life. From The Walrus at Coney Island”: All watchers gasp together as he dives, The clumsy fore fins clever now as knives, The dark head bobbing in the dazzling spray Of sun-shot water, like a child’s at play. So this is what he is, has always been A gleaming, sleekly muscled submarine, Lithe as a dancer, roguish as a boy, Corkscrewing downward with what looks like joy.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1949883 in Books
- Published on: 2006-04-15
- Original language:
English
- Dimensions: .29" h x
6.10" w x
8.98" l,
.34 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 91 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Children play furiously in the "asphalt pen" of the schoolyard, and after the bell calls them in, a handyman ascends to the gym roof, "gathers up the balls that got away . . and punts them, in bright arcs, back into play." Sixty years ago in Germany, two student Resistance leaders sail leaflets into a university building's stairwell; porter Schmid catches "the dark-haired young man's shoulder in a rough / Policeman's grip . . and the girl stayed by his side." A very little girl, alone for a minute in a big room during a wedding party, dances. Tufariello conjures such common-enough scenes so vividly that one's mind and heart are fully engaged, and not by means of the virtual prose most new poets still essay, but in meter and rhyme so skillfully employed that they swing a poem's sense as well as its impetus. This is genuinely, though not deliberately, musical verse. From the more public scenes of the poems in the first part of her first collection, Tufariello turns to interfamilial and marital themes in the second, to bittersweet love in translations of early Renaissance Italian poems in the third, to biblical stories of childbearing and women's friendship in the fourth, and in the last, to the story of her later-than-usual pregnancy and the triumphant birth of her daughter. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Catherine Tufariello has taught literature and writing courses at Cornell, The College of Charleston, and the University of Miami. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry and The Hudson Review.
