Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems

by Eleanor Wilner

Although she has recently won the prestigious MacArthur prize, Wilner still remains relatively unknown to readers of poetry. This work anthologizes poems from four of her previous volumes and adds new poems written between 1993 and 1996. Few other poets writing now show Wilner's intellectual curiosity and range: bats, goddesses, Asian art, photography, and the politics of the body all have their turns here. Her manner is conversational and digressive; the easy categories of lyric or narrative do not describe her work effectively. She invests old stories with new meaning, as in "Leda's Handmaiden" or "Iphigenia, Setting the Record Straight"; she has a profoundly nuanced sense of the poet's mission, as in "The Messenger," "running through history...[carrying] a code/ only the heart could break." She seems at her best when her manner is half-satirical, as in "How To Get in the Best Magazines," "Preferred:/ tired little poems, taut,/ world-weary," or in her portrait of the poets' Muse, "the big broad...ethereal as hell." Wilner's verse is not principally musical, pleasing the mind more than the ear, but she ought to find an audience among most readers of poetry.

Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Genres: Poetry

250 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilner's poetry enchants. Becoming tired in the early morning hours, I would mark my place and start to close this book of magic, but my eyes would catch just enough of the first lines of the next poem to ensnare me once more. It happened again and again until I finally gave up and finished the book, only to start reading the poems again at random. She imagines what might have been and rewrites myth and history to reveal new truths seen from unanticipated perspectives. Her impeccant sense of the poetic line demands the reader's entry into the poet's universe as she reveals "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." Some of the selections come from her 1979 collection, MAYA. "Maya" in its Sanskrit meaning is an apt description of much of Wilner's best work. There is a playful, illusory quality in her poetry that weaves new spells even as it reverses others. If you are willing to chance enchantment, read this book.

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the very first poem in the anthology, "Trummerfrauen (The Rubble Women)", with its distinctive Wilner sound patterns — "the relentless percussion of life goes on". This poem is from a collection published in 1993. Then this anthology travels backwards in time, which I think is unusual. Anyway, I found many more poems I wanted to keep in mind forever in the older collections. Many of Wilner's poems are conversations with myths, like "The World is not a Meditation" and "Recovery" that remind me to believe in connections with story. Some are conversations with other poems, like "Meditations on the Wen Fu". And some of the most amazing are poems that put humans in the natural world, like "Natural History." I will be returning to this book.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 W744r 1998