Blue Venus: Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar

In Blue Venus , Lisa Russ Spaar explores the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred. Her nocturnal poems weave themselves into the very fabric of private fervorlyric, sexual, spiritualbeginning with "Dusk" and continuing on until "Dawn." Fierce and giving, Spaar's exquisite verse isolates essential moments of vulnerability and wonder. A series on insomniain the voices of some notable insomniacsis among the most moving extended sequences in recent memory. Elsewhere, she traces poetry back to its primordial rootsprayer, lullabye, mourning, exaltation. Propelled throughout by a resolute belief in the relationship between the human and the cosmic Blue Venus is "a brilliant new star in poetry's firmament" (Carol Muske-Dukes).

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2004

About the author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly or are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. --Poetry Foundation

Reviews

[C]

Tangled language and ethereal moments abound. My favorite poems were the ones most grounded in story, like the section below.

from "The Insomnia of Thomas Merton"

"August 20th, 1968: Today, among other things, I burned M.'s letters. . .I did not even glance at any one of the them. High hot flames of the pine branches in the sun!"
-Merton's journal

IV.

"I am the door,"
Christ said. To cross over in perfect
emptiness I must relinquish rooms
I opened, then closed (once, "among other things,
I burned M.'s letters"). Possible to leap here,
perhaps, among thin air and rocks--

Was it M. I was dreaming
of before I woke, swimming at night
in the green lake at the secret center of my body,
the water a weightless vestment on her shoulders,
waiting for me to call to her from the stony shore,
to hold and keep her, at last?

How could I have written
"among other things?"
There is no other thing.

[Nelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Potentially intimidating language. Descend...

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lisa Spaar's lyric poems are formally interesting and imagistically astute, but they never surprised or transported me far from the page. These poems are solid and clear, but sometimes I want transcendent.

[Ali Thursland · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, divine, ephemeral, pastoral, sultry