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Song & Error: Poems
A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice
A sparrow like a “fumbled punch line” is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.
In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal’s beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy’s poems strive to endure within “the crease of transformation” and to speak—sing—of that terrible beauty.
A sparrow like a “fumbled punch line” is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.
In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal’s beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy’s poems strive to endure within “the crease of transformation” and to speak—sing—of that terrible beauty.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2013
About the author
Averill Curdy
7 books2 followersA lyric poet influenced by Donne, Hopkins, Merrill, and Auden, Averill Curdy notes, “In my own work, the aural quality and weight of words is very important and I think it’s partly an attempt to make them feel as material as the smears of color on a painter’s palette.” Her meditative, dense lines are smoothed by time; as Curdy explains, “I write slowly—always, it seems, at the very limit of what I know.”
Curdy began to write poetry seriously in her 30s, a few years after her mother’s death. Early in her writing career she took a workshop with Ed Hirsch, whose encouragement motivated her to pursue writing further. She earned an MFA at the University of Houston and a PhD at the University of Missouri.
Curdy co-edited, with Lynne McMahon, The Longman Anthology of Poetry (2006)—a painstaking task during which she found that “Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson seem to be the only poets on whom everyone agrees.”
She has won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writing Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Council for the Arts. She has also won a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New England Review.
She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.
Curdy began to write poetry seriously in her 30s, a few years after her mother’s death. Early in her writing career she took a workshop with Ed Hirsch, whose encouragement motivated her to pursue writing further. She earned an MFA at the University of Houston and a PhD at the University of Missouri.
Curdy co-edited, with Lynne McMahon, The Longman Anthology of Poetry (2006)—a painstaking task during which she found that “Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson seem to be the only poets on whom everyone agrees.”
She has won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writing Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Council for the Arts. She has also won a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New England Review.
She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 9, 2016
Is your clement voice, saying
The dark has no teeth. While men like you live
In this world do I dream
I am either safe or spared?
My love,
What may never not be strange? What,
This morning, will wake & make me new.
The dark has no teeth. While men like you live
In this world do I dream
I am either safe or spared?
My love,
What may never not be strange? What,
This morning, will wake & make me new.
January 3, 2016
Temperamentally the chasm I cross to Averill Curdy's literary manner is the romance greaves & breastplate she rarely lays aside, a cultural cut that comes a cropper when in "The God of Inattention," it collapses, thusly: "I've heard a voice, I'm sure | Advising me to drop this sentimental farce. | Yet to hold the smoke of their names | Again in my mouth I'd resurrect | The dead, or adopt the gods orphaned | By atheists, except the gods they've made | From disbelief no one's faith could tolerate." This is blunt and unreconstructed; it assuages her when in the voice of Constance Fenimore Woolson she addresses Henry James' homosocial secrets: "My own | True home, my country, I've found | In your stories, dear Henry, -- | Like your letters somewhat more satisfying | Than you." She's getting at what she must know is a problem, that -- atheist though he was -- James mastered in those feats of equilibration. Our interest goes not into Curdy's research, formidably distant as it may appear. In the Ovid translator George Sandys' verse letter to "Thomas," whom we assume to be a fictional muse Sandys writes from early colonial Jamestown, the interest is in their own homosocial love, and about this Curdy has only her 19th century amative epistolary style to fall back on. It's a fascinating anachronism estranging the historicism of a romance carried on against the backdrop of the Powhatan massacre. We leave such an anachronism on the table, as it were. They are no less real than the psychosis of the Huntsville, Texas warden whose voice from a radio Curdy tunes happenstantially into, for "How long I have listened to you | For news of opal distances, | | Or rain to freshen the morning's arrival." Her estheticizing instincts are on the ready in a debut that often plays her out as the dupe.
March 24, 2015
How can you not love a series of poems about Jamestown? Or poem that uses "we" and means it? Italics to indicate conversation that aren't annoying? Portraits that don't exist, other great research. A sliver of self.
January 3, 2015
This may be the most brilliant poetry collection I've read. And I read a lot of poetry!
January 18, 2018
Wow, I knew the poet was good but not THAT good. Exceeded my expectations by tenfold. Writing goals.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews