The Ardors

by Kathleen Peirce

“Startling in their mystery, these poems are entirely original; abstract and passionate, sensual and otherworldly, trance-like and exciting . . . . The Ardors is a book that takes us beyond ourselves, beyond our workaday bodies and souls.”—Jean Valentine.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[J]

From Underneath

When we were untouched by human voices,
we could hear music played, and we were not unlike
the selves we brought to animals
whose presences were instruments of love
almost without fail. We saw birds every day;
before we slept we often thought of how those fly
who fly at night, not the dark topfeathers
serrating another dark, but the pale
underfeathers hidden by a wing that could, and had
glanced back. Fish also kept a paleness underneath;
don't think we weren't afraid. Our stillness
was pearl-stillness; if we were radiant
it was a radiance accrued while having been contained.
We wondered why to shell is to pry out. Music was beautiful,
fathomless in a way we understood, the notes most often
falling at the end like words in sentences, pearls in water,
animals, blue sky. We understood that in the time it took
each chord to play, some of us would die. Some continued
being held; others were holding still and listening.




Fondle Pearls and They’re Quick To Fly

Outermost nacreous layer where reflection was
made constantly to bend is how the pearl turned,
even when at rest, like the simple hunger of the dead
brought to bear on the smell of baking bread,
then felt by us as peacefulness
when bending toward a loaf, a slice, a crumb. In this way
we felt acted on as well as left alone, at every turn
reawakening with variation,
with the sense of previous bearings
as well as those we lacked. We saw ourselves
not in the pearls we found, but in the pearls too deep,
too underneath, that went unseen
and were increased. These lay together in our minds;
with these we made adornments for someone.




*

[Holly Fortune · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poems from this collection: "Of Air," "Time Shall Not Lose Our Passages," "Slow Song," and "Apart."

[RedScarySpice]

Lovely, quiet, and atmospheric.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of the five volumes of poetry I picked up today. It wasn't really bad but it wasn't the greatest volume of poetry I've ever read either. The imagery was lovely and the poems were certainly atmospheric--they were just....intensely inaccessible. I generally don't edit in my head when I read poetry like I do prose, but I found myself thinking of better ways to structure about half of these lines to flow better for me. Many of these poems read like someone who heard of the notion of poetry decided to write something--like it's trying too hard to be deep but ends up pretty and not connecting to anything at all. I think out of this entire book, there was only one poem that resonated with me and it wasn't the deep sort of resonance I've had with other poetry, just me kind of desperately looking for something to hold on to. Maybe I'm not the audience for this book, I don't know.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely enchanting, captivating, mind-expanding, cataract-removing poems. Too many favorites to list, but here's what is probably my favorite moment in the book, from a poem called "Night and Day":

“We believed
a flight of thought takes shape as real motion, even
in dream, where some dream-walked above dream-blooms
while others aged in a wakeful night of pain; that these,
occurring in a single night, made a place
where thoughts could catch, and move as something higher,
physical, where we could have an anodyne to close around
our furthest flowerings of pain”

I'm going to be revisiting these poems often.

[Bonnie Jean Michalski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh to read The Ardors is like beeswax candles and that delicately perfumed rice pudding that is so hard to come by. This book is smart but it comes so much more easily than in Mercy or The Oval Hour. Dare I say beauty. Beauty beauty beauty.