Kirjahaku

In Fred Chappell’s introduction to The Kelly Cherry Reader, he writes, “Cherry is a flambeau example of the extremely conscious artist, a writer who mediates ceaselessly upon the problems and possibilities of the poem, the novel, the short story and the essay. She ponders what she has done and how she has done it; she thinks about the approaches and techniques she has employed, and she labors to extend and expand them. This kind of effort is not common to all writers, many of whom will write this year pretty much the same novel they wrote year before last, the same poem they wrote twenty years ago.”Cherry has long been a writer whose work has remained vital and, due to her diligence, fresh. Here, in the Reader, she collects a body of work, much of it no longer in print, and permits us to remap and re-explore where her writing has come from, where it has gone, and where it is bound yet to go; it reacquaints long-time fans and invites new readers to discover the importance of her work.

Life is A Kind of Dream. So is the art we make in response to life. In A Kind of Dream, five generations of an artistic family explore the ups and downs of life, discovering that for an artist even failure is success, because the work matters more than the self.The selves in this book include Nina, a writer, and her husband, Palmer, a historian, who, having settled into marriage and family life, are now faced with the bittersweetness of late life; BB and Roy, who make a movie in Mongolia; Tavy, Nina’s adopted daughter, a painter in her twenties who meets her birth mother for the first time; and Tavy’s young daughter, Callie, a budding violinist. Other vivid characters confront the awful fact of violence in America; try to cope with political ineptitude; and one devises his own code of sexual morality. Perhaps the most important character is Nina's dog, a salt-and-pepper cairn terrier of uncommon wisdom.Fame, death, rash self-destruction, laughter, the excitement of making good art, love, marriage, being a mother, being a father, the appreciation of beauty, and always life—life itself, life in all its shapes and guises—it’s all here.A Kind of Dream is the culminating book in a trilogy Kelly Cherry began with My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers and The Society of Friends. Each book stands alone, but together they take us on a Dantean journey from midlife to Paradise. Cherry’s prose is hallmarked by lyric grace, sly wit, the energy of her intelligence, and profound compassion for and understanding of her characters. Set in Madison, Wisconsin, A Kind of Dream reveals a surprisingly wide view of the world and the authority of someone who has mastered her art. It is a book to experience and to reflect upon.

In January, 1965, in the café of the Hotel Metropol, in Moscow, the young American poet Kelly Cherry met the young Latvian composer Imant Kalnin. They fell in love, and began an alliance of the heart and mind sustained over twenty-five years in the face of threats from the Central Committee, surveillance by the KGB, confiscation of mail by censors, and eve ""disinformation."" Their passionate friendship, growing out of a recognition of each other's artistic destiny, also survived the hazards of other relationships, romantic and familial, and the professional demands of two careers, and sheer distance. There was more at stake here than just love. Or maybe just love is exactly what this romance was about: the deeply felt attempt to learn whether and why and how to love justly. What can love mean, when the world in which it is expressed and experienced is corrupt?In The Exiled Heart, Kelly Cherry takes on that profound question, seeking answers to it at every level, theological, political, artistic, personal. In this book that is in the great tradition of Dostoevsky and Anna Akhmatova and at the same time startlingly original and American, she translates experience into a work of classic dimensions. Interpreting in extraordinary prose her firsthand encounters with Latvia and Latvians, describing a weekend at an underground hotel in Leningrad, or recounting misadventures with the Soviet consulate in London (the same cast kept changing characters), she pursues a philosophical quest. The Exiled Heart is a nonfiction narrative journey that, of necessity, makes metaphorical excursions into philosophical territory as Cherry reflects on the nature of justice, the idea of utopia, morality in art, the meaning of despair, the problem of suffering, the possibility of forgiveness. As the author explains in the first chapter, ""I didn't know, in 1965, where that train was taking me: to Moscow, I thought, but equally to my heart and my conscience. This book is a kind of log, a moral travelogue if you will, of a course that was set then and there, deep into heartland.""These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written side trips broaden an autobiographical story into a tale of political exile and personal covenant that is almost a paradigm for the history of the Cold War and for the faith in the future that has always led people and nations to strive for independence. Beginning with a girl and a boy in a Moscow café, in the end this stunning book is about nothing less that the soul's search for freedom.

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams, the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake, it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs.In the poems of God's Loud Hand, Cherry conducts, often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry (""Lord save me,"" ""Lord forgive me,"" ""Lord help me""), a metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr, perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a willingness to ask Abraham's great question, ""Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge wisely?""This intellectual boldness reveals itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points logically, no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks, an exaltation of larks, as they say, that rise each morning to heaven's gate, but instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy's own music.And in what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods. From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama, through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the orchestral outburst of the final group of poems, poetry celebrating its own freedom ot be poetry, in all these parts (""a chorus of lyrics,"" one might say) there is a symphonic unity that astonishes, an ode to joy.

In this, her latest, deeply moving collection, Kelly Cherry confronts the basic questions of love and death, faith and suffering. From her search for ""a new poetry"", one that can face up to the worst barbarities of the twentieth century, Cherry wrests a passionate, authoritative, powerful vision that is itself transfiguring. Death and Transfiguration focuses on the wisdom one gains from pain rather than on the pain itself. Cherry, betraying no fear, grasps her anguish to see how much she can stand. Dedication, tenacity, and spiritual poise are needed to make precise observations of this kind in the most trying times. In Death and Transfiguration, Cherry demonstrates how such displacements of the mind carry with them their own analeptic.""Requiem,"" the collection's long closing poem, gathers all of these deaths in a single embrace. This spectacular piece, emotionally akin to Anna Akhmatova's poem of the same title but as closely and brilliantly reasoned as philosophy, transforms everything that has gone before, creating a strong, unified work.

With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women's experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet's remarkable range and skill.The book's journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Beginning with Adult Ed. 101: Basic Home Repair for Single Women, Cherry asserts, ""Ladies, you are about to find out / just how much really rough / weather / your house can take."" Probing the emotional extremes of woman's life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. That fearless art inhabits the role of An Other Woman and then explores the status of woman as aesthetic object, whether of the male gaze, cultural perception, or her own observation: ""she sees the long-haired girl she used to be, / in boots and mini-dress, apart and watchful / as in a redoubt, in a room in a painting in / a room, or as if in a poem turned inside out"" (The Model Looks at Her Portrait: A Retrospective).A passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in Sunrise, ""A sky as blue as if it were / The backdrop for a Renaissance / View of the Ascension"" becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn, ""a morning / Risen from the night."" The title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman's hard- earned rise into her own sense of self: ""Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny.

Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry's poetry, on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form, and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing that coheres into a single, seamless work. In it she responds to the natural world, to philosophical dilem­mas, to spiritual longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and, most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse a new, bright prospect, a ""green place"" on a farm in Virginia where time slows and holds and happiness abides.

Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry's poetry, on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form, and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing that coheres into a single, seamless work. In it she responds to the natural world, to philosophical dilem­mas, to spiritual longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and, most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse a new, bright prospect, a ""green place"" on a farm in Virginia where time slows and holds and happiness abides.

In this book-length sonnet sequence, Kelly Cherry explores the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new ones, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. A former philosophy student in graduate school, she retains a deep love of philosophical inquiry and maintains that our lives are intimately bound to the philosophical choices we make. Conscious study of our choices, Cherry believes, can lead to greater freedom. Passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry, these succinct poems concern themselves with very large matters -- the nature of time, the definitions of goodness and beauty, the aims of art, our limited knowledge of the world -- and illustrate with aching clarity that philosophical problems dominate our lives as does the sky.

Winner of the 2013 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry AwardIn her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world and lives.The poet begins with silence and animal sound before taking on literature, public discourse, and the particular art of poetry. The sequence ""Welsh Table Talk"" considers the unsaid, or unsayable, as a man, his daughter, and his daughter's friend sojourn on Bardsey Island in Wales with the father's female companion. The innocence and playful chatter of the children throw into sharp relief a desolate landscape and failed communication between the adults. In the book's final section, Cherry considers translation, great art's grand sublimity, and the relation of poetry -- the divine tongue -- to the everyday world. Witty, poignant, wise, and joyous, The Life and Death of Poetry offers a masterful new collection from an accomplished poet.

Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.""- Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize- winning The Making of the Atomic BombQuartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America's best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer's inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone.""Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?"" says Cherry, in ""The Nature of War."" Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry's narration of Oppenheimer's life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other.""Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West's Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.""- Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel

In Observing the Invisible, Kelly Cherry crafts poems that explore the ever-evolving realm of modern physics, confronting the invisibilities and mysteries of the material world. She leverages challenging ideas into a space of contemplative wonder as the book moves from external observation into an increasingly inward space of personal reflection and expression. Throughout, Observing the Invisible remains deliberate in its concentration on what cannot be, almost as if the poems are being erased even as they are being written. Acknowledging that such contradictions cannot sustain themselves for long, Cherry seeks out these difficulties and ultimately finds resolutions.

Nina is a Virginia belle, now out shoveling Wisconsin snow. Divorced, childless, and middle-aged, she's alone again, having been recently left by the man she loves. She has a cute, cuddly dog for company, but what she really wants is a baby - a desire magnified by the insistent ticks of her biological clock - and the ""right man"" to father it. She consults the gurus of self-help for guidance. In so doing, she must confront an old ghost - that of family incest and the handsome, brilliant, ruined brother whose Svengalian pull has dominated her life. When it was first published in 1990, My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers received glowing reviews for its freshness and mastery. Alison Lurie praised it as ""a witty and moving account of what it's like to be a woman in America today, when the promise to 'Have It All' has become a demand."" The Washington Post stated, ""so honest are the passion and pain...so complete the world created...Historics are revealed with a well-timed line, ironies distilled to a moment."" And the Los Angeles Times Book Review commented that rather than becoming a sad tale of the battle between the sexes, this book is ""far too witty, too savvy, too lyrical and compassionate to resort to bitterness."" In My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers, Kelly Cherry writes with lightness and grace about some of life's most serious subjects - the nature of family, aging parents, alcoholism, sexual violation. As her brave heroine journeys from self-blame to self-help, a beam of humor lights her way. How Nina finds her answers - and triumphs in a way she couldn't possibly have predicted - makes this a fascinating story alive with joy and with sorrow.

In a series of humorous observations, this work explores the art of writing, its relationship to place and its importance in our lives. The author also reflects on being a women writer.