About the Author

ALICE NOTLEY, considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, has published more than twenty collections of poems. She has also received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.

Reviews

"The inexhaustible reach and ceaseless invention of Notley's vision make Grave of Light a thrilling testament to her greatest poetic gift: an unwavering faith in poetry's power to change the real." - Brian Teare, Boston Review "It's not often one finds oneself reading a selection of poems from cover to cover with the eagerness of a good novel; and then you come to the end and slow down, because you didn't want to finish... I can't say I've enjoyed a book this year half as much as this." - Steven Waling, Stride"

"The inexhaustible reach and ceaseless invention of Notley's vision make Grave of Light a thrilling testament to her greatest poetic gift: an unwavering faith in poetry's power to change the real." - Brian Teare, Boston Review "It's not often one finds oneself reading a selection of poems from cover to cover with the eagerness of a good novel; and then you come to the end and slow down, because you didn't want to finish... I can't say I've enjoyed a book this year half as much as this." - Steven Waling, Stride"

Always innovative and occasionally maudlin, the poems in Notley's latest book play haphazardly with figures of sound and speech. Showing the influences of ee cummings and William Carlos Williams ("So Much," for instance, is Williams minus the brilliant imagery), these free-verse poems are written as letters, postcards, and prose-paragraphs. Many use quotation marks instead of periods and commas; others rely on the line break to suggest meanings, which may or may not be present. In one of the most evocative and representative poems here, "Choosing Styles-1972" (from Mysteries of Small Houses, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Notley suggests both the metaphorical and the emotional territory of her work. As she muses on the process of her poetry-"who wants to write in old long lines clearly and not be/ slightly more inscrutable/ askance in freakier/ lines, in brilliance/ outflame/ blaze; flash-?"-she arrives at her subject: death. Although the ending evokes an uneasy resonance with ee cummings ("Buffalo Bill"), it also shows Notley's talent for finishing a poem as opposed to merely stopping it. Suggested for larger libraries.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.