MOVING & ST RAGE
vol. 6: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
- Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1998
March, 1999
Published
66
Pages
23 cm.
Features
About Fagan's MOVING & ST RAGE
“Kathy Fagan’s long awaited second collection keeps revealing new strengths, new powers. Its words are of unsparing rigor; its intelligence and vision continually spring forward in changed ways. These are poems both revealing and resistant: deeply felt, deeply communicative, yet avoiding any easy lyricism. Again and again the reader pauses, astonished by some fresh turn of language, of insight, of terrain. MOVING & ST RAGE offers extraordinary pleasures, clarities, and depth.” —Jane Hirshfield
“From the first emblems of language—the angular letters of A and K—a child steps toward the preservation of consciousness, and, in turn, the paradox of preserving that which is lost. These beautifully crafted poems trace a journey to adulthood and grief with a lyrical mastery that is breathtaking. What can language do with loss? Fagan asks. This splendid book is her answer.” —Linda Bierds
California, She Replied
It’s driving into all that goldness makes
You blind, she said. The road oats, timothy,
The mustard hung beside the highway like
So many crowns thrown out, she said. That ma-
Ma cow who cools her thin blond ankles in
A shiny ditch? Her baby’s bones hurt—it’s
The newness. Poplars, too, they have their secrets
With each other. Seen them at it in my
Rearview, whisperin where the smoke trees get to
Once the mist’s burnt off. Why, I was in a
‘Nother country by the time I knew, myself,
Where I live comfortably, to this day,
She ended, without question.
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, T. R. Hummer, judge.
About the Author
KATHY FAGAN, author of the National Poetry Series selection The Raft, currently teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State University, where she also co-edits The Journal. Her work has appeared in The Southwest Review, The Denver Quarterly, The New Virginia Review, Nebraska Review, The Antioch Review, The New Republic and The Kenyon Review among many others. She has received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and Editors’ Prize for Poetry in The Missouri Review.
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