The Profile Makers: Poems

by Linda Bierds

Retaining the freshness and integrity of her previous works, this collection of unexpectedly personal poems is linked to one another through language and ideas, in a luminous meditation on immortality. Simultaneous.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

Linda Louise Bierds (born 1945 Delaware) is an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at the University of Washington, where she also received her B.A. in 1969.

Her books include Flights of the Harvest Mare; The Stillness, the Dancing; Heart and Perimeter; and The Ghost Trio (Henry Holt 1994). Since 1984, her work has appeared regularly in The New Yorker. Her poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies. She lives on Bainbridge Island.

Awards

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Artist Trust Foundation of Washington and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1998, she was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant.

Reviews

[Kali · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this book are extraordinary in their language and empathy for the people whose lives the poet illuminates. I feel that the poems now live inside me.

[Brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book several times--and each time my other reading about its subjects (Mathew Brady, Thomas Edison, Julia Margaret Cameron, and other makers of images) has enabled me to perceive details, like hatchings on Brady's glass plate negatives, I had not perceived before.

Since I'm currently working on a conference essay that addresses Bierds' handling of the art/science relationship in the poems that feature early photographers and film-makers, I don't want to expend too much energy on the details of individual texts in this review. However, I must say that I continue to be impressed with Bierds' ability to imagine scenes that transcend the frames of biographical record.

Yes, knowledge of contemporary, critical response to Cameron's portraits can add to the readers appreciation of "Vespertilio," for example, but I don't think that readers who don't have time to conduct research should fear missing out. Bierds gives us what we need to know to appreciate each poem. Her word portraits are "sharp in [their] livingness," focusing on that telling "glaze of amber earwax, / a leaf of tobacco like ash on the beard" (27). Despite Cameron's notorious blurriness, we see much more than we ever could in an encyclopedia entry.

[PEN Center USA · Rating 5 out of 5]

1998 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Poetry