Overview

A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness—shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion—its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy—her first and truest subject.

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9780593536155

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Reviews

"Praise for Cynthia Zarin “Cynthia Zarin’s poems are as beautiful as anything being written today.” —Wayne Koestenbaum “Cynthia Zarin knows that sometimes all that’s needed to raise ordinary speech to poetic richness is a single, right word.” —Ken Tucker, The New York Times Book Review Praise for Orbit ""Read this book and J.M.W Turner comes to mind. . . in particular, his late stage work, when issues of craft have been long resolved, and what we see is pure feeling, sublime and urgent. Essential reading for those seeking magic on the page."" —Iris S. Rosenberg, Library Journal Praise for The Ada Poems “Cynthia Zarin caresses Time in these rich, sonorous, Lowellian poems that limn female desire, longing, and loss. Zarin uses the ardor of Ada to capture her Muse.” —Edward Hirsch Praise for Fire Lyric “Zarin’s marvelous gift for linguistic play, her gentle humor and her sheer delight in imaginative stanza form and rhyme punctuate this collection and provide a relief that serves to sharpen the reflective edge of the serious poetry.” —Robert Hosmer, The Southern Review Praise for The Swordfish Tooth “Cynthia Zarin makes a brilliant debut. She writes with grace, wit, and—for one so young—remarkably fastidious self-possession. In their sparkling flow and elegance these are poems that make me think of dance and flute-music.” —Stanley Kunitz"

Author Information

CYNTHIA ZARIN was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of five previous collections of poems, including most recently Orbit, as well as a novel, Inverno, and two books of essays, Two Cities, and An Enlarged Heart, and several books for children. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

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