Selected Poems Of Janet Lewis

by Janet Lewis, R.L. Barth (Contributor)

Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems. With the publication of her selected poems, Swallow Press celebrates the distinguished career of one of its most cherished authors.

Critics as disparate as Kenneth Rexroth, Timothy Steele, Theodore Roethke, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Dana Gioia have sung the praises of her work over the decades. Her career as a poet was remarkable not only for its longevity but also for the fact that even well into her tenth decade she wrote poems that stand with her very best work.

Characterized by the vigor and sharpness of her images and the understated lyricism that permeates her rhythmic lines, The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis is a survey of modern poetry unto itself.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 2000

About the author

Janet Loxley Lewis was an American novelist and poet.
She was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and her future husband Yvor Winters. She was an active member of the University of Chicago Poetry Club. She taught at both Stanford University in California, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Reviews

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a career of writing poems and fiction (her best known novel is "The Wife of Martin Guerre") from the 1920s to the 1990s, you'd think Lewis's work would vary more in quality, but she was quite good from the beginning to the end. She revisits many of the same themes over the decades: gardening, love, death, remembrance, solitude. I enjoyed seeing how her approach did or didn't change from her youth to old age. Here are some snippets.

From "Lines to a Kitten"

Morsel of suavity
Perched on my knee,
Furred silken beast, your golden eye
With its great crystal lens is bent
Upon a fly
Six feet away, and all your tiny life, intent,
Crouches and peers through the dark slitted vent.

From "Fossil, 1975"

Changed and not changed. Three million years.
This sunlight-summoned little fern
Closed in a cenotaph of silt
Lies in my hand, secret and safe.
In quiet dark transformed to stone,
Cell after cell to crystal grown,
the pattern stays, the substance gone.
Changed and not changed. Three million years.

From "For the Potter"

Remembered in bowls holding fruit,
The flare and curve of the clay, smoothed
To the color of jewels, or earth tones;

Remembered in plates, shadowed with leaves,
Eucalyptus, maple, fern, or the
Ancient ginkgo, holding the nourishment of a simple day;

Remembered, old friend, past your remembering,
When the chemistry of the brain had betrayed you
Into a long forgetfulness.