So Forth: Poems

by Rosanna Warren

With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, So Forth blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural; identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae, with formidable women artists of the past, with pre-Socratic philosophers, with lovers, children, and strangers—the strangest of whom is the face in the mirror. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and the traditions of the sacred.


From “For Chiara”

. . . Do we stop seeing

when we walk away? The brook prattles on.

Home’s far off. Dusk settles, slowly, among leaves.

That’s not mercy, scattering from its hands.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2020

About the author

On July 27, 1953, Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut. She studied painting at Yale University, where she graduated in 1976, and an MA in 1980 from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

She is the author of Ghost in a Red Hat (W.W. Norton, 2011); Departure (2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981).

She has also published a translation of Euripides’s Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995), a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2008), and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989).

Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the Nation/“Discovery” Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.

She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. She was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. She is a professor at The Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago, IL.

Reviews

[emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a wasteful or terrible experience. The poems weren't badly written. But I didn't connect with any of the poems, they didn't make feel anything or understand more than I already do in a literal sense. These are those poems where the narrator just describes the setting/places (in a way that doesn't feel unique to her; it's as if anyone else could have described like that) - and everyday things without really telling us why she's doing it - not with words or in tone/lit. techniques. I just personally do not enjoy these kind of poems. For instance - the poems about 'aging' - I wanted to know what that had meant to the poet/the voice of the poem - but all I got were neat chunks of stanzas describing the bare mundanity of life.

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever, gorgeous, as historical as they are contemporary. So you have to work a little and read slowly with this volume but what poetry doesn't demand that? Once I figured out Warren's flow and was able to sync up with her voice (second reading) I was available for lines like these:

"In those pictures you took/the thigh carves a perfect arc against the thicket at the mouth of the cave/and flesh pleats illegibly If it's a god"

One of the things I appreciate most about Rosanna Warren is her ability to choose the perfect word: scumble, jocund, cotillion, vernissage... I could go on. Each one of these poems contain a perfect little picture of brilliance and song.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love poets who use words in ways that make me feel like I’ve never heard them before, new perspectives spoonfuls at a time.

I found the first few poems in section III to be rather unintelligible, but other than that this collection is brilliant.

My favorites are: Cotillion Photo, Shelf, Tashlich, Diamonds, Mother and Child, Scenic View, As If, At Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, Mink, So Forth, and In Passing.

[Francescajemm · Rating 5 out of 5]

As smart and clever as they are erudite and philosophical.

[Gary Shea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea. Too few chords were struck.

[The_J · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few nice turns of phrase

"I don't pretend
to know anyone well: people
are like shadows to me and I
am as shadow>"

But too little meat in this gruel