Worldling

by Elizabeth Spires

“With not one wrong move, not one word off-key or trivial, this collection of poems makes us experience intimate, yet not necessarily personal, contact with the poet who lets us at times see the struggle behind the refined sensibility. . . .Spires asks the big questions with such competence and polish that we admire her sweating, our metaphysical gladiator, guarantor of our considerable pleasure.” ―Nancy Nahra, Philadelphia Inquirer Winner of a 1996 Whiting Award. In her fourth collection of poems Elizabeth Spires addresses the elemental subjects of life and of literature: birth, death, creation, and intimations of immortality. The first section focuses on the experiences of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth from the points of view of both mother and child. The second section offers a reversal and reply in which the poems move out into a divided and divisive world. These poems are distinguished by an immaculate lyricism, a pristine sense for the natural world and the rhythms of language.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published May 1, 1992

About the author

Elizabeth Spires is the author of five collections of poetry as well as several books for children. She has been the recipient a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 she received the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association. Her poems have been featured on National Public Radio and have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Criterion, and in many anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry (7th edition) and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, and their daughter, and is a Professor of English at Goucher College where she holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement.







Now the Green Blade Rises (2002)

>> read " 'In Heaven It Is Always Autumn' "





Worldling (1995)

>> read "Truro," "Worldling," and "Celia Dreaming"

Also by Elizabeth Spires

- Annonciade
- Swan's Island
- Globe

Editor

The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, and Occasional Prose of Josephine Jacobsen

Books for Children

- The Mouse of Amherst
- I Am Arachne
- Riddle Road