What do you think?
Rate this book
Rapture
Rapture is the newest collection from a remarkable voice in American poetry. Susan Mitchell's poems are about self-discovery, and how memory and experience blend to lead us to newer, more realized and complex selves. Mitchell's gift is her ability to see, with humor and acuity, the extraordinary within the commonplace. Whether listening to a jazz pianist reaching for new sounds as he lingers over a hotel piano or recalling a runaway child on a bus trip across America, Mitchell guides us into a world of her narratives, a world in which she creates her reality by the mere act of observing it, and this reality, at once wholly unique and deeply familiar, has an exhilarating capacity for transcendence. Combining a boldly realistic vision with graceful, evocative lyricism, and moving easily between free verse and elegant versification, Rapture confirms Mitchell's place as one of the most compelling poets writing today.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
1 person is currently reading
81 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 22, 2011
Mitchell divides the book into three parts. The subjects of the three sections are 1) individual vs. self/other individuals 2) individual vs. society 3) reconciliation of individuality in society. Themes: disconnection, childhood, adulthood, revitalization, rebirth, family.
The theme of disconnection and the consequential impotence is addressed in the 1st section's poem "The Hotel by the Sea."
...But the man
wanders inside the piano like someone looking
for an elevator in a drafty building
or like a drunk who can't find
his way in a song he keeps repeating.
The piano wants to play leaky faucets and water running
...The piano wants to scratch. It wants to spit
on the pavement. It wants to look into stores where women
try on clothes and open their thighs to the mirrors.
The simile of the player as drunk who can't whistle a song in contrast to the personification of the piano as sexual deviant and rebel "to spit on the pavement" pushes the theme of disconnection and lack of vitality.
In the third section, "Women in Profile: Bas-Relief, Left Section Missing" shows a group of women who reconcile with disconnection and even find it revitalizing due to the variety that it promises through rebirth.
...Or perhaps it's they
who have broken off, suddenly freed
like guests departed, their pockets stuffed
with cake wrapped carefully in paper
lace, turning one last time to toast
the musicians who have started up again, the pianist
playing the small bracelet of light someone
dropped in a corner, its endless variations.
In the poem, the women turn their disconnection into freedom by empowering themselves. They take "cake wrapped carefully in paper" and they toast the pianist who has found a dispossessed bracelet that he has connected with and is compared to "light" and possesses "endless variations" like the women now enjoy now that they are free and have enjoyed a rebirth like the bracelet in the pianist's hands.
Like most modern / contemporary poetry, Mitchell's musicality is subtle. The form is free. Most of the rhythm is determined by punctuation, line breaks, length of lines, and flow of images. Most of the rhyme and sound is inside the lines rather than end rhymed etc. Alliteration, assonance, chiming, and off rhymes are frequent. For instance all the aforementioned make the following lines from "Havana Birth" into music:
Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning
of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather
straps and watch the sky while three couples
who have been dancing on the deck of a ship
in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss
each other's cheeks and call it a night.
The passage is filled with alliteration such as the hard "c" and assonance like the long "e," and punctuation breaks the flow of the enjambed lines with caesura. Verbs push the tempo after the first line.
Mitchell's book is a good conemporary read.
The theme of disconnection and the consequential impotence is addressed in the 1st section's poem "The Hotel by the Sea."
...But the man
wanders inside the piano like someone looking
for an elevator in a drafty building
or like a drunk who can't find
his way in a song he keeps repeating.
The piano wants to play leaky faucets and water running
...The piano wants to scratch. It wants to spit
on the pavement. It wants to look into stores where women
try on clothes and open their thighs to the mirrors.
The simile of the player as drunk who can't whistle a song in contrast to the personification of the piano as sexual deviant and rebel "to spit on the pavement" pushes the theme of disconnection and lack of vitality.
In the third section, "Women in Profile: Bas-Relief, Left Section Missing" shows a group of women who reconcile with disconnection and even find it revitalizing due to the variety that it promises through rebirth.
...Or perhaps it's they
who have broken off, suddenly freed
like guests departed, their pockets stuffed
with cake wrapped carefully in paper
lace, turning one last time to toast
the musicians who have started up again, the pianist
playing the small bracelet of light someone
dropped in a corner, its endless variations.
In the poem, the women turn their disconnection into freedom by empowering themselves. They take "cake wrapped carefully in paper" and they toast the pianist who has found a dispossessed bracelet that he has connected with and is compared to "light" and possesses "endless variations" like the women now enjoy now that they are free and have enjoyed a rebirth like the bracelet in the pianist's hands.
Like most modern / contemporary poetry, Mitchell's musicality is subtle. The form is free. Most of the rhythm is determined by punctuation, line breaks, length of lines, and flow of images. Most of the rhyme and sound is inside the lines rather than end rhymed etc. Alliteration, assonance, chiming, and off rhymes are frequent. For instance all the aforementioned make the following lines from "Havana Birth" into music:
Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning
of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather
straps and watch the sky while three couples
who have been dancing on the deck of a ship
in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss
each other's cheeks and call it a night.
The passage is filled with alliteration such as the hard "c" and assonance like the long "e," and punctuation breaks the flow of the enjambed lines with caesura. Verbs push the tempo after the first line.
Mitchell's book is a good conemporary read.
October 25, 2007
It's not that the poems aren't well-crafted...they're just too long (pages!) and too narrative for my taste. Plus, there's a "child in the hospital" poem in there. God.
However, there are moments of true beauty in here. I especially loved the last poem in the book, "Sky of Clouds". Here's an excerpt:
...Toward this hour a dark gray wading
bird comes to drink the water in the swimming pool,
a saliva color restores to the mouth. Hello,
strange bird, with a taste for chlorine.
Very slowly, as if arthritic, it dips
deep into its own transparency. I think
it drinks. I think it is not a mechanical
prank someone has left there. Its
throat muscles are moving.
However, there are moments of true beauty in here. I especially loved the last poem in the book, "Sky of Clouds". Here's an excerpt:
...Toward this hour a dark gray wading
bird comes to drink the water in the swimming pool,
a saliva color restores to the mouth. Hello,
strange bird, with a taste for chlorine.
Very slowly, as if arthritic, it dips
deep into its own transparency. I think
it drinks. I think it is not a mechanical
prank someone has left there. Its
throat muscles are moving.
March 11, 2008
There is much to be admired in Susan Mitchell’s second volume of poetry. Her poems are rich, lusciously weaved narratives that dart back and forth in time, memory and consciousness. She culls interesting details from life, history, myth and music to create rich tapestries that inundate the reader through all of the senses and cover serious ground on the topics of gender, sexuality, urban living and familial relations. For me, her poems worked either fascinatingly well or I became lost in her disjointed reverie and the poem failed to pull me through it. Overall, though, there is still much to be learned from this beguiling voice in modern poetry.
March 7, 2016
This collection has some brilliant moments but also some very weird stuff I just couldn't enjoy. The brilliant moments, though, are REALLY brilliant. Mostly the brilliant moments come in the first 2/3rds of the book--in particular "Havana Birth" and "Self-Portrait with Two Faces."
Read
December 21, 2023i loved this SO DEEPLY! the last section was weaker for me (except for maybe the last two poems) but the first two sections were just mind blowing
July 7, 2017
Tony Hoagland recommended this book to me 10 years ago, and I finally got around to reading it. I'm glad I did. The voice is amazing: funny, sensual, perceptive, vulgar, conversational. It's full of commonplace stuff--a crowded apartment complex, bus trips, bars, parties--that's elevated through the poet's imagination, humor, and keenness of observation.
The book's last poem has these lines:
"[...]I am a woman talking to you
who exist like tinsel, a flash
and flicker at the periphery of my hearing."
That's a good artist statement for this book. The voice feels direct and grounded, but also very aware of how intangible and peripheral the audience is. It sounds self-conscious, but also self-confident. The poems are very dreamlike in their associative logic, their completeness, and their emotional depth. I liked these poems the most: "The Hotel by the Sea," "Leaves that Grow Inward," "A Story," and "Sky of Clouds." Her titles aren't actually all that glitzy, but they're a great, simple counter-balance to the often long, complex, tangled, rich poems that follow.
The book's last poem has these lines:
"[...]I am a woman talking to you
who exist like tinsel, a flash
and flicker at the periphery of my hearing."
That's a good artist statement for this book. The voice feels direct and grounded, but also very aware of how intangible and peripheral the audience is. It sounds self-conscious, but also self-confident. The poems are very dreamlike in their associative logic, their completeness, and their emotional depth. I liked these poems the most: "The Hotel by the Sea," "Leaves that Grow Inward," "A Story," and "Sky of Clouds." Her titles aren't actually all that glitzy, but they're a great, simple counter-balance to the often long, complex, tangled, rich poems that follow.
Read
January 22, 2012A given of Elizabethan thought -- expressed in works as different as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA -- was God's goodness as made manifest through the "infinite variety," to use Enobarbus's phrase, of his creation. Susan Mitchell's second collection is an extended hymn in praise of our world's abundance, or, in the current term, its multiplicity.
Mitchell, author of a volume published in 1983, THE WATER INSIDE THE WATER writes poems that read like richly embroidered verbal tapestries, with one narrative woven into another and then into another through the grace of a lyrical moment that allows her to perceive connecting threads where none had seemed visible before. In "A Story," for example, memories of two bars, one in Chicago and one in New York, and of a stabbing that took place in the former, are joined in the poem's coda by the speaker's revelation of a blood transfusion she received when nineteen, and her body's adverse reaction to it. "For you," Mitchell concludes, "who raised a rash on my arms / and made my body shiver for days, listen, / whoever you are, this poem is for you."
What the speaker of "A Story" experiences in her body, the violent collision of two opposing forces, is the joyous source of polyphonic song in these ambiguously original poems, whether those forces appear as literary ("Night Music"), geographical ("Cities"), social ("Havana Birth"), or personal ("Self Portrait With Two Faces"). Life in the 1990s may appear to be as fragmented and as pocked with lacunae as the subject of "Mosaic, Probably Narcissus"; it may appear to sound "like gibberish," as RAPTURE's title poem states. But when we have as guide and interpreter Susan Mitchell, a latter-day Orpheus who knows how to sing from such varied fragments rather than bemoaning them, an unforgettable poetry is the result.
(originally published in PLOUGHSHARES)
Mitchell, author of a volume published in 1983, THE WATER INSIDE THE WATER writes poems that read like richly embroidered verbal tapestries, with one narrative woven into another and then into another through the grace of a lyrical moment that allows her to perceive connecting threads where none had seemed visible before. In "A Story," for example, memories of two bars, one in Chicago and one in New York, and of a stabbing that took place in the former, are joined in the poem's coda by the speaker's revelation of a blood transfusion she received when nineteen, and her body's adverse reaction to it. "For you," Mitchell concludes, "who raised a rash on my arms / and made my body shiver for days, listen, / whoever you are, this poem is for you."
What the speaker of "A Story" experiences in her body, the violent collision of two opposing forces, is the joyous source of polyphonic song in these ambiguously original poems, whether those forces appear as literary ("Night Music"), geographical ("Cities"), social ("Havana Birth"), or personal ("Self Portrait With Two Faces"). Life in the 1990s may appear to be as fragmented and as pocked with lacunae as the subject of "Mosaic, Probably Narcissus"; it may appear to sound "like gibberish," as RAPTURE's title poem states. But when we have as guide and interpreter Susan Mitchell, a latter-day Orpheus who knows how to sing from such varied fragments rather than bemoaning them, an unforgettable poetry is the result.
(originally published in PLOUGHSHARES)
March 27, 2008
Susan Mitchell’s poems were quite amazing. I will impressed with her ability to be very narrative and yet at the same time find wonderful juxtapositions and lines that made them feel less pedestrian. I found series poem Cities absolutely wonderful. The interjection of historical figures gives her poetry a universality and intellectual depth. Her insights on figures such as Dante are effective, “The master fashioned a city. He called it Purgatory, he called / it Hell, to replace the woman he lost. / And when the city was lost, he remembered the woman and closed his eyes.” There is a passion and a tenderness without sentimentality. I find the image of the snail in more than a couple of poems. I wonder if it permanence symbol of the snail is why she uses it? She also has a wonderful ability to bring inanimate things to life, “ I am breathing that/ exhalation that the city gives off at night.” I am very glad that this book was suggested. I am going see how I can incorporate some the things that she does in her poems to my own.
August 18, 2007
Absolutely beautiful. I found this on the coffee table of my apartment, and it didn't seem to belong to anybody. I took this as a sign that it had been placed there, especially for me, by a divine and loving hand. It turns out it was Julie's all along, but it was still a divine appointment, as the evangelicals say.
October 5, 2008
I want to give this five stars only because "Smoke" could quite possibly be my favorite poem of all time. I love that poem so much that I could read it over and over. I'd type it out here, but I honestly think that it is a poem that is good enough to buy a full book for. Did I mention that I am head-over-heels in love with that poem?
June 15, 2007
This poetry is amazing! It's strange, and takes surprising turns in each poem. The language is lithe as a bird.
December 31, 2014
I really wanted to like this more.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews