Peace

by Gillian Conoley

Peace is haunted by personal and political history―by figures of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau–by current senators and dead musicians, by speech and painting, by extraordinary and ordinary lives. Written as though at the threshold of a continual co-presence and comingling of peace and war, Peace moves just beyond outrage and anger to bring the reader to revelations and shifts of consciousness, to possible visions and sightings in the shattered yards of the global dream.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Gillian Conoley (born 1955) is an American poet, the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. Conoley's poetry has appeared in Conjunctions, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, The Canary, A Public Space, Carnet de Rouge, Jacket, Or, Fence, Verse, Ironwood, jubilat, Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Missouri Review and other publications. A recipient of the Jerome J. Seshtack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University,[1] where she is the founder and editor of Volt. She has taught as a Visiting Poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Denver, Vermont College, and Tulane University.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's the review I wrote for KR Online. This was a very rewarding book to sit with and think about.

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online...

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hear Gillian Conoley's voice as I read these poems; by voice, I mean her real & physical voice, its temperature, resistance & flirtatiousness. The poet's experience shapes these recent poems as much as the gorgeous yet quirky language that she has long been lauded for. Conoley says that the primary obsession in her work is perception, which, although true, perhaps downplays the vivid thoughtfulness everywhere evident in the poems themselves. She stares America right in the face & stares it down with lines such as these:

"We could unfold and try once more to open/ a language in which we do not do/ most of the killing"
& "We could all take off our skulls and stare into them" ("an oh a sky a fabric an undertow")

"with patience I can sit on this bench// and wait for the ironworks of a previous century/ to reverse themselves// . . . . time to move along/ it's pathos time" ("The Patient")

"What are we to the man/ who attacked the gunman/ as he started to reload, a constituency?" ("Opened")

"we were thinking a lot about the feminine/ we were putting our feminine in a suitcase" ("Plath and Sexton")

"it was morning and all the white guilt got balled up/ and tossed through the sky then landed back/ into the white guilt which had made a very good deal with the white privilege" ("Monday Morning")

"I didn't want my eyes to be/ my reality negator" ("Begins")

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inimitable Gillian Conoley just keeps getting better and better. This book is both astounding in its political address and heartbreaking in its intimate concern. One of our best

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

there is a lot of room for metaphysics
in this country I call waiting…
this dispatch sun I wish you each
euphoriant ephemery everything
ought to keep on going
I imagine my life

(my poem review)
In September of 2018, I added this book to my list,
but I can’t remember how I found it, but I wish I could,
the poems feel like one of those synchronous,
serendipitous paths that is saturated with meaning.
I had spent the year before celebrating the life of my
Beloved first dog who died the November before
and the main way I did this was to dance in beautiful places.
When my second dog was born in September, 2018,
and he came home to me, when he was small enough,
I danced with him in my arms, near our special grove
with the ancient cottonwood. It is a mystery and on
the list between Requiem by Curtis White
and Profane Halo by Conoley, and the next book is The River
at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangstze & Back
in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester, and I feel the arc
of deep time and am back in the grove, dancing
with the wonder and gravity of these poems
that span time and what it means to be alive.

an oh a sky a fabric an undertow

an oh a sky a fabric an undertow
a blanket laid upon the grass
all the mixed faces

looking out or looking in

the great paintings

in yard sales and museums

abstract or representational oils acrylics ink

in the poem the evening is spread out

…
what all gets transformed

back into earth's core

I would like to take some of that infant stardust that has fallen on your head

Why can't I be shrouded in it

if only undercurrent.

The small aircraft…
then we stood and then we wept again
through the dark moment of the alder the white containers of the spruce
and the mountains coveting their caves. I had nothing to do with it but
then I tried to come to terms with might I have learned the mountain's
names if you were in the mood for giving them, couldn't you see the way
the earth lay as if waiting for the other planets to slow down to its pace.
Pace, crease, then begin again, heartbeat, pen scratching its way from dare
did I tell you my most innermost secret, did I try to converse at all, no
way to do that trailed my being all the way here, and then I stood apart


The Patient

I am patient. That is my mineral fact.

I have long term storage in double helixes

my two long polymers of nucleotides
my backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups
joined by ester bonds. I see imagist pears dissolving down

golden arms I hear needle-less the sleep aid cd's
real violins, then float blue-black

at the eventide…

4th

of July
…
love

sound-chamber'd

moon's

far off

place…

Opened (for Gabrielle Giffords)
Here we pour a new layer, visible

for all to see how we want
to be as transparent as possible,

but remain gradient…

[Peace]
if a no more one without the other
could peace and war be a co-presence
peace and war a co-presence
one hand holding another
a metaphysics their separateness a reality
one can no longer touch? we flock to, inflate
death's impatiences…

BEGINS
begins with sound of bell
ends with briefcase dark
glorying day's pantomime
I feed on color
I take the symbols turn them over
I don't understand a thing
when I look, I sturdy the thread
on the lake, form
when I look, a face
a living unity recomposed
for one eye, a small Mesopotamian figure
for one eye, a big abstract
I look, and your face is like a part of speech not spoken
a tragedy so near its comic ash
one eye is my future, one eye, my mausoleum
the divine in what is seen
in which we view only the shade of
possibility: a semi-reluctant scribe I read her book trembling
scattered in every territory
as one of the visibles this dispatch
sun I wish you
each euphoriant ephemery
everything ought
to keep on going
I imagine my life

Hannah at Buckskin Pass near Aspen, 2013

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, the problem with the Sealey challenge (a challenge that entails reading a book of poetry each day in August), is that there are many, many poets whose work calls for more time and space to read. I feel sure Conoley is one of those poets, but...I'm reading quickly here, and reading quickly, didn't form a connection to these poems. The language is often beautiful but so broken down -- I frequently can't tell what are sentences, what are fragments -- and Conoley's propensity for using lower caps does not help the situation. Most of the book I had the impression that I was lacking critical context for the poem I was reading. I think that's why the one poem that stood out to me, Opened (for Gabrielle Giffords) did stand out -- finally, a poem where I understood what the language was doing because I had the historical background.

[Victoria (storieswithtorie) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Peace” is the kind of poetry collection that asks you to slow down and sit with the unfamiliar.

I picked this up on a recent trip to Los Angeles at The Last Bookstore in downtown, which for me was a place that already felt like a portal into something creative and surreal, which made this the perfect find. This was my first poetry read in quite a while, and it reminded me why I need to make space for more poetry in my life.

Gillian Conoley’s work doesn’t follow a straight path. Her language is experimental and often abstract, but there’s a rhythm and rawness to her words that kept me fully present. Some poems made me pause and reread. Others just sank in quietly and left a strange comfort in their wake.

Not every piece connected with me in the same way, but the overall experience was rich and thought-provoking. If you’re in the mood for something lyrical, unconventional, and full of depth, Peace is a beautifully unexpected read

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can talk, intellectually, about how these poems' fractured nature enacts the fractured attempts at finding peace, how it's been shattered by history, etc etc. Conoley's poems do do that: what they don't do is openup emotionally beyond fragments--little moments--here and there. That's not to say I don't have favorites in this book ("Plath and Sexton," for one), just that the book never asked me to engage it.

[A. Anupama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my review of Peace in the March issue of Numero Cinq Magazine: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/03...