A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006

by Laura Moriarty

Drawn from 13 previous poetry collections, this selected compilation includes many poems from hard-to-find collections as well as new work from one of the most formally inventive and lyrically innovative poets writing today. Whether examining the historically gendered gaze of artistic and cultural narratives and their impact upon the individual, the symmetries that interlink to figure our social and political horizons, or the destructive forces that both expose and explode our meaning of self, these poems offer the expansive pleasure of revelation in each finely distilled articulation. This collection offers readers a range of work from the poet’s long writing career and includes an introduction by poet Norma Cole.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books, the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007. Who That Divines is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is the author of ten other books of poetry going back to 1980. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.

Photo by Marc Lecard.

Reviews

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Were I encountering these poems for the first time, this would certainly be a five-star review. However, given some familiarity with the serial impulse at work in much of Moriarty's verse, one can't help but find it a bit frustrating to be presented with only excerpts of some of the early, hard to find or out of print volumes.

Really, this is a quibble with the idea of a "Selected Poems" in general, though...

[Laura]

"light" kept appearing in our 3:15s , so , reading into atonalist.