Genius Loci

by Alison Hawthorne Deming

From a poet and essayist whose writing about nature has won her comparisons with Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams comes a new collection that offers further evidence of her ability to trace the intersections of the human and nonhuman worlds. The title poem is a lyrical excavation of the city of Prague, where layers of history, culture and nature have accumulated to form “a genius loci”—a guardian spirit.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2005

About the author

Poet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and women’s health issues for many years. A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer. Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems (1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge.” The collection, described by Deborah DeNicola in the Boston Book Review as “a dense, majestic, wise and ambitious book,” is listed among the Washingon Post’s Favorite Books of 1994 and the Bloomsbury Review’s best recent poetry.

Deming’s other poetry collections include The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), Genius Loci (2005), and Rope (2009). Genius Loci was praised by D.H. Tracy in Poetry: “Alison Deming’s title means ‘spirit of place,’ but be warned . . . Deming doesn’t belong, or want to belong, to a single place long enough to find its genius, and so she functions more like a naturalist of naturalism, classifying the spirits of place as she encounters them.”

In addition to numerous journal and anthology publications, Deming has published works of nonfiction, including Temporary Homelands (1994), a collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001). She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (1996), and co-edited, with Lauret E. Savoy, The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2002; second edition 2011).

Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.

Reviews

[E · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought I might like this collection mainly because the poem it's named after is about Czech Republic and mainly Prague, where I live now. But to be honest, I couldn't care less about it or anything else in this book.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite poems: "Genius Loci" and "Wild Fruit."

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title Genius Loci is in Poland, though other places are also mentioned.

[William Stobb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've liked Alison Hawthorne Demings poems in the past for the ways that they're straight up, pretty committed to a conventional kind of clarity. In Genius Loci, none of that clarity is lost, but the poetry seems sharper. I'd recommend her Science and Other Poems, and I'd recommend this book really highly too.

[Talia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps this book is just mismatched to me. The nature-y-ness of this book just makes me yawn.

[Malcolm Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

I prefer her first book, "Science and Other Poems", which won the Whitman award, to this one.

[Alix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful use of words - she makes it seem so easy.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Is it perversion or sacrament, this chapel/dressed with human bones?"