Eruv
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Published:8th Apr '14
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize
Eryn Green’s Eruv is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners that includes Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Hass, and as Carl Phillips, competition judge and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, points out, this collection “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented.”
Taking its title from the Hebrew word for a ritual enclosure that opens from private into public spaces, Eruv includes poems of love, sadness, and pathos while celebrating the power of ritual and untamed landscapes. Just as a larger home can be fashioned out of communally shared alleyways and courtyards, with passages enabling movement from one world to another, Green’s poems provide a similar doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.
I am standing on the freeway
and cars move by like drunk panthers
I am loved again
like there was future again—
—from “Sounds (Second Walk)”
“In American character, there is an interval between Vision and Prophecy, during which time the deepest poems first find themselves aloud. Eryn Green literally phases that interval straight across spellbound pages. These poems show character alight. They show a continent its names.”—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems
“Make the whole neighborhood your house, and then allow the wholeness of the universe to become your shining shelter. Eryn Green’s poetic brilliance extends our sense of home, of our being at home in the universe.”—Bin Ramke, author of Aerial
“These poems, filled with and discharging light, are open-voiced trajectories tracing the energy fields that extend around the human figure. They are the lighted path not to the exit but to the opening door, their motion the very figure of outward—alive, in love, moving through the passageway with the hope of the lyric. We don’t come to our senses, but to the open-hearted word bursting out toward the world.”—Eleni Sikelianos, author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead
ISBN: 9780300201222
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 6mm
Weight: 132g
96 pages