Gap Gardening
Selected Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published:6th May '16
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Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”
Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.
"Her work [is] a powerful mixture of directness and disjunction: she conveys information at one moment only to shatter the method of conveyance at the next." -- Ben Lerner - Harper's
"With this collection, it is evident that Waldrop's universe begins where Einstein's ends. Nearly fifty years of lyric riffs, meditations, and collages, using as source material the works of physicists, philosophers, explorers, historians, and critics, from Columbus to Wittgenstein, seek to simultaneously define, deconstruct, and, finally, re-construct a mind in motion." -- Music & Literature
"A wonderful mix of philosophical conversation, erotic questions and astrophysical speculation—defiantly brilliant speculations." -- Publishers Weekly
"A page of Waldrop will focus the reader on the intricate (or simple) ways words connect or fail to connect, depend on or defy punctuation, suggest or deny meaning." -- The American Book Review
"This influential avant-garde doyenne … handily manages the paradox of the lucid enigma.… She maintains a distinctly American voice—quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete: a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles." -- Voice Literary Supplement
"One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry. Waldrop’s nimble poetics of ‘gap gardening’ provides the emotional and ethical center." -- Boston Review
ISBN: 9780811225144
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm
Weight: 327g
256 pages