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Karen Whalley
THE RENTED VIOLIN |
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ISBN 1-931337-14-4 (paper) $14.00
ISBN 1-931337-13-6 (cloth) $24.00 2004. 72 pages Purchase from Copper Canyon Press Catalog |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR | SELECTED POEMS | VIEW CART REVIEWS & COMMENTS “Most first books of poetry are hardly more than a delightful nosegay of early spring blooms. Here is one, however, that fills us with the deeper delights of a bouquet gathered in a later and more mature season. Karen Whalley's poems are made from humble material: the quotidian realities of ordinary, stoical people who have constructed lives from mortgages and childrearing, shopping malls and interstate motels, doctor's appointments and cutting the grass. What Whalley sees beneath the surfaces of those lives is the terrible price of foregoing beauty. Her feel for the unconscious agony of hurt and longing that so many people carry about with them reminds us of James Wright. Like him she has mastered the art of unpacking, in simple language and delicate metaphor, the yearning for transformation that is at the center of our human spirituality.'Make it beautiful / And it will save you,' she says in the title poem, and that is what she does. I am stunned by the wisdom of these poems, and pierced by their heart-lurching beauty." —Kate Daniels "The best of these poems imitate unfiltered thought, moving with no apparent effort from the immediate (for example, the scent of French-milled soap in a leisurely bath) to the imponderable (mass murder, in the form of 2001's terrorist attacks). Their tone is frank, unguarded, and elegant; when she arrives at a transcendent moment, this poet is able to say more than she knows, and far more than her speaker's situation implies. The results can be superb." —John Casteen IV in The Virginia Quarterly Review "Karen Whalley's first book of poems is a study of invention, not in the conventional sense, in which something new is created out of nothing, but in the way a frugal person good with a needle might make over a dress. The underlying materials remain constant, but find new shape and expression through carefully chosen additions and shifts of vision. Most of Whalley's writing itself is simple, with few frills of complicated words or pretentious rhetoric. This is essential; it draws the eye all the more to sudden twists of language and those moments when the reader realizes she is completely immersed in a new reality. Whalley spirials inside the body, inside the argument, inside the grains of our lives to describe them as if the damages and the joys were another world entirely, a world in which the narrative could be any of the past lives or dreams of the made-over dress, or the rented violin. . . . Whalley's book is indeed a charm to discover, a collection of layers not to shed, but to unfold and refold for someone else to find." —Abigail Cloud, Pleiades |
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