And

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

by Debora Greger

From the title poem:

Ampersand

pink as dead shrimp, the unborn curls in its tide pool--seed pearl

whose mother lusters over irritant love it's too late to dislodge;

little anemone, shrinking from touch. So and holds separate what it most closely binds.

Review:

Ms. Greger's poems take place at the point of encounter between the mind and the world of matter. . . . And it is the resistance of the real and the increasing urgency the poet feels in trying to extinguish her solitude . . . that make these poems emotional.--The New York Times Book Review

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Debora Greger (b. 1949) is an American poet and visual artist.

Greger was raised in Richland, Washington. She attended the University of Washington and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Greger then went on to hold fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida until retiring. Greger now works as Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art.

Greger has published numerous books of poetry, including Men, Women, and Ghosts (2008), and her work has been included in issues of Best American Poetry . As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed, Greger “rarely rejoices, though she can surely console; her pruned-back, autumnal sensibility and her balanced lines suit the scenes she portrays.” Her poetry has been included in six volumes of The Best American Poetry and she has exhibited her artwork at several galleries and museums across the country. She also has a poem on Poetry 180 in number 42. Her work appeared in Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The New Criterion.

Debora Greger lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with her life-partner, the poet and critic, William Logan.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a fierce intelligence in these poems, and a lovely mixture of humor, wonder, and sadness. I found myself underlining a phrase and putting down my pencil, only to have to pick it up a couple lines later for a differently but equally surprising line:

Gulls pennant fog's dim tent

where a cormorant dries oilless wings,
meek, fake mermaid in a sideshow

of disappointment.

I love the visual precision and strange music of that first line, then I love the sadness and cheapness of that fake mermaid. These poems really pack a lot in.

What takes me out of the book is that, occasionally, the intelligence comes off a little showy, a little alienating. There's a lot of cultural name-dropping: Piranesi, Rodin, Freud, Chekhov, Eurydice, Trisan and Isolde. Even the title of that Beverly Hills poem has an epigraph from Fitzgerald that it doesn't especially need. The book is in three sections, and there's a long stretch from the latter half of II to the latter half of III where I was kind of in and out. The poem "Precipitation" really brought me back in, though, when it describes a snowed-over landscape:

The ordinary's

white-sheeted like the cheap
summer furniture it is, angles obscured,
hinting not itself, unfaithful reproduction,

but some sturdier original.

Here, the poet alludes to Platonism without mentioning Plato. I love how the book carries the theme of reproduction and authenticity from beginning to end. I love the book title, too, and how the book bears out the epigraph from which its title comes: "We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'" The poems succeed in making us rethink even the most ordinary assumptions.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A complex read, with beautifully structured, layered language. I wanted to diagram Greger's sentences.