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Count the Waves

Poems

Sandra Beasley author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:12th Jan '17

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Count the Waves cover

In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart's pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."

Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."

Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

"Beasley tackles our moral progress, with its wounds of love, authoritatively and emphatically." -- Washington Independent Review of Books
"Sandra Beasley is a master poet of facts, story, feeling, and the slipknot statement that binds them together. Inventive, ingeniously fitted, musical, precise, unfettered, her poems etch and mirror the clarities and strangeness of our human lives. This irresistibly visionary book resembles to no small degree a cabinet of wonders. To every phenomenon and circumstance of the heart, its poems open, saying, Yes, this too I know; this too we are. Then add, Now, let us see further." -- Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief
"Her lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep." -- Poetry

ISBN: 9780393353211

Dimensions: 211mm x 140mm x 10mm

Weight: 127g

96 pages