Duse

by Laura Moriarty

This publication brings back into print Laura Moriarty's beautifully spare and precise poetry-sequence that focuses on the great dramatic actor, Eleanora Duse. The ephemeral becomes tangible within this poem, with projected memory becoming the basis of a hoped-for "things cherished a whole / civilization artificially would / have." The text becomes a reflection upon its opening "Loss as rest from meaning." The intersection of the solid with the transitory, the real with the artificial, leads the reader into a world of uncertainty, of mimetic gestures coming ever closer to the core experience, ever searching for emotional truth. Duse was originally published by David I. Sheidlower's Coincidence Press. Laura Moriarty is also author of Like Roads, Cunning, Spicer's City and Rondeaux.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

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.