The Radiant

by Cynthia Huntington

In Cynthia Huntington's The Radiant, what is most tragic can, and often does, become beautiful. "What/ is memory? Who stays to mourn?/ It seems we feel so much/ and then we die. The marsh hawk/ veers over the grass, listening." Poems about Multiple Sclerosis and domestic turmoil are never drowned in the rhetoric of complaint, but seized by language that is intense yet seeks the equilibrium of its own level: "His loneliness is cold water. that makes rocks shine. Great stillness/ where he is. Then, slowly, birds." The poems in The Radiant flow brutally from a scarred heart, from "what grows hard, and cannot be repaired." But in the end these are prayers of thankfulness, prayers that transcend desire: ". . . we belong here, where no one is refused,/ in the room we come to at last--immortal,/ irreparable, beyond hope."

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She has published several books of poetry, most recently The Radiant (Four Way Books, 2003). In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including TriQuarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Sribner, 2008) and Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury College Press, 2002).

Huntington has received grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other awards include: the Robert Frost Prize from The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the Jane Kenyon Award in Poetry, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize.

She was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and received her M.A. from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the 10 books of poetry that were already on my shelf that I've chosen to read this year. I remember purchasing it after reading rave reviews on Wompo close to 10 years ago. This is one of those examples of book knowing when to show up in a person's life. I struggled a little in the first segment, feeling like Huntington's sensibility was outside my range of understanding. I could feel her command of the language and exquisite connection with nature, especially the ocean side but I felt like I wasn't grasping something more profound. That all changed when I got to the second segment where poems about betrayal took my breath away. Then came poems about the body, her body, and multiple sclerosis. There is one called "Lumbar Puncture" that is luminous and another called "Nothing" that was unbelievably compelling. When I finished, I went back and re-read the initial poems and I could now dive deeper into the light and wind and grass with Huntington.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't so much care for the second and third sections, but the first and the last sections were absolutely gorgeous. It was great recognizing points in Provincetown that she writes about, great getting that reminder of the water and sky and rocks there.

[Matthew Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite collection of hers, but well worth reading for the four curse poems surrounding her divorce. If you are new to Cynthia's work, I recommend Heavenly Bodies.