Things and Flesh: Poems

by Linda Gregg

Throughout Things and Flesh , there is a wonderful sense of song, a kind of ringing up and down the scales of being. Here, Linda Gregg engages with the searches and findings of both the intellect and the body. This is poetry beautiful in its attention to the things and flesh of this world, to a life of passionate maturity and substance and the mysteries found within.

Loss is a constant companion in Things and Flesh as the poet explores what lesson can be found in "the way this new silence lasts." What all the poems accomplish is to carry the grief we must all by nature endure. They carry our grief across boundaries, over time, and perhaps even beyond, into what used to be called "salvation"--but which Gregg now indicates is instead the place where poetry is made. the consolations are hard won, but no less triumphant.

Things and Flesh is a collection that again demonstrates how, as Joseph Brodsky said of her earlier work, "The blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stain the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do."

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Linda Gregg is the author of several collectios of poetry: In the Middle Distance, Things and Flesh, Chosen by the Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma,Too Bright to See and All of It Singing. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry and has won a Whiting Award.

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I lie in the palm of its hand. / I wake in the quiet, / separate from the air that's moving the trees outside. / I walk on its path, fall asleep in its darkness. / Loud sounds produce this silence. One of the markers / of the unknown, a thing in itself. To say / When I was in love gives birth to something else. / I walk on its path. The food I put in my mouth. / The girl I was riding her horse is not a memory / of desire. It is the place where the unknown / was hovering" (The Unknowing, 39).

3.5 stars. I don't know if I agree with some of the theology (even if lightheartedly spoken), but it's nice to be challenged, to think about one's own thinking. Gregg strikes me as a mysterious mixture of Mary Oliver and Louise Glück, so I'm definitely going to attempt another collection of hers.

I finished reading this in the back of a cathedral with organ accompaniment—a very dramatic reading experience. 10/10 would do it again.

"I hear the nothingness with eyes open. / My heart fills with it / like a peach I ate all of. / I dream of the next country of me. / A land of shining rivers, the two silences / and the wind" (The Old Songs, 49).

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard, pure, compact poems full of light.

[Yukti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Gregg's book of poetry contains odes to silence and loneliness and celebrates them with happiness. There is talk of love and its abandonment and yet it is juxtaposed with a sense of gratitude instead of plain sorrow. There is a vast influence of Greek mythology as well as modern Greek imagery including places, culture, and lifestyle which come from her 5 years there. The poem about George Oppen clenched my heart in fear and grief. I also saw shadows of guilt and shame briefly and felt connected. I loved the starkness and clarity of the images. I recently read an essay that she wrote about the art of finding a poem in which she mentions that one of the elements that are necessary for writing poems is "locating the concrete details and images out of which the poems are built." Her collection is filled with such details. It's definitely a collection I will revisit in the future.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading, the Gregg books are like ointments. American poets glory in shallow foregrounds. Frequently a reader won't know what the poets were doing a year ago much less yesterday. (Often enough it will be something like Teaching Comp.) Into this maw of vocational mundanity, enter Linda Gregg's classical evisceration of scene. At times the whole set-up appears back-spun, like an airplane trying to take off in the mountains. "The special beauty of what's absent," Gregg describes her back-spin. So during poems that aren't making it, you're drawn into the poems that are: "The Precision"; "Alone With the Goddess"; "Gypsy Kings"; "Etiology"; "Heavy With Things and Flesh"; "A Thirst Against"; "In the Half-Light"; "Like Lot's Wife"; "The Muchness"; "Winning."

[atito · Rating 2 out of 5]

too self-consciously wise for my liking. weirdly uncomfortable alignment between the earthly pleasures & laboring bodies/work songs. when wordsworth does it, he leaves that gap of attribution and appropriation open... i did like two poems though, which might be all the riches one can ask for from a book of poems so

[Felicia Caro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found these poems soothing, especially for those bodily aches and pains related to love in the midst of longing.

[Isak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Milosz said he considered Linda Gregg one of the best American poets. These poems are fine I guess

[Kasandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag; perhaps this wasn't her best book to start with. I will definitely try another, because some of these are excellent, and she's clearly a talented writer. However, many of these pieces were so short that I struggled to find any imagery or vocabulary that spoke to me and was relatable, either personally or universally. It's clear the book has to deal with grief and limitation, especially concerning the loss of love, but it feels repetitious at points, and what seems like it's perhaps meant to be mystical or metaphysical can come across as frustratingly vague. Poems I liked: Calamities: Another Eden, The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates, The Soul Ripening, Io: Shape-Shifted, and Finding the Way.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure if this was the collection to start with or not. Found many stunning poems, full of a well-traveled mind's traveling. Overall, there's a wonderful sensuality to the intellectualism. I did grow tired by the end of the collection of some overused words: "love" and "passion" and "silence," in particular. Though Gregg often grounded/sensualized these abstractions, their personification was no longer exciting to me. I'd rather intuit that a poem is about love or passion and the threat to both, than be told.

[S]

unfulfillment in religions

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can read and reread this writer, who uses language in a deceptively simple way and is so sensual as well as sensitive.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 G8193th 1999