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Departure: Poems
"An important poet...beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets."―Harold Bloom Ancient and modern eras, sacred and earthly forces, personal and communal mourning are all held in the arc of this exquisite new collection. Named an Honor Book in the 2004 Massachusetts Book Awards, Departure celebrates the marriage of contraries in private poems of difficult love as Rosanna Warren explores intimacy and separation between mother and daughter, husband and wife, artist and muse, woman and demon lover.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Rosanna Warren
41 books18 followersOn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 23, 2009
If you are a lover of poetry and also ancient literature--and/or ancient ruins, or history in general--then this collection will most likely appeal to you. Intelligent poems, painstakingly crafted, to be read slowly and savored, thought over. I thought the long poem "Intimate letters" and the short poem "Simlie" were really fantastic.
February 11, 2023
These poems, for me, were esoteric, and I was hard-pressed to “get it,” even though I had access to the "cliff notes" on the internet. I don’t have much experience in ancient mythology, so I often got lost during my reading of the poems that lean on the writings of Virgil and Homer. Frustrated, I felt that to truly enjoy these, one must have a Ph.D in the classics. Despite my own deficiencies, I admired Warren’s language—terse, every word placed with the greatest of care. No cliches, no tired expressions – all fresh and innovative.
Throughout my reading of the book, I imagined Warren writing extra-large first drafts of the poems, then trimming out big chunks, then more, until finally she came to what she felt was the pith. But perhaps, I thought, she inadvertently took out too much, leaving in their wake a quagmire (at least for me). Certainly, this is not true, but a better knowledge of the classics, on my part, would have allowed me to fare better.
My favorite poems were the personal ones: “Moment”, “March Snow”, and my absolute favorite, “Simile”. The latter--her mother's death-bed experience--was so powerful and intriguing that it compensated for all the difficult poems that came before, and after, it. I wanted more of these. But they were sparse.
For those who enjoy the ancient classics, you will enjoy these poems. I am excited to read more of Rosanna Warren's books.
_________
"Simile"
As when her friend the crack Austrian skier, in the story
she often told us, had to face
his first Olympic ski jump and, from
the starting ramp over the chute that plunged
so vertiginously its bottom lip
disappeared from view, gazed
on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him
like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not
for all his iron determination,
training, and courage
ungrip his fingers from the railings of the starting gate, so
that
his teammates had to join in prying
up, finger by finger, his hands
to free him, so
facing death, my
mother gripped the bed rails but still
stared straight ahead -- and
who was it, finally,
who loosened
her hands?
Throughout my reading of the book, I imagined Warren writing extra-large first drafts of the poems, then trimming out big chunks, then more, until finally she came to what she felt was the pith. But perhaps, I thought, she inadvertently took out too much, leaving in their wake a quagmire (at least for me). Certainly, this is not true, but a better knowledge of the classics, on my part, would have allowed me to fare better.
My favorite poems were the personal ones: “Moment”, “March Snow”, and my absolute favorite, “Simile”. The latter--her mother's death-bed experience--was so powerful and intriguing that it compensated for all the difficult poems that came before, and after, it. I wanted more of these. But they were sparse.
For those who enjoy the ancient classics, you will enjoy these poems. I am excited to read more of Rosanna Warren's books.
_________
"Simile"
As when her friend the crack Austrian skier, in the story
she often told us, had to face
his first Olympic ski jump and, from
the starting ramp over the chute that plunged
so vertiginously its bottom lip
disappeared from view, gazed
on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him
like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not
for all his iron determination,
training, and courage
ungrip his fingers from the railings of the starting gate, so
that
his teammates had to join in prying
up, finger by finger, his hands
to free him, so
facing death, my
mother gripped the bed rails but still
stared straight ahead -- and
who was it, finally,
who loosened
her hands?
March 4, 2021
not quite my thing. i liked a few though.
November 5, 2009
Think of a book as a flowing stream. It's alive with the waving fronds and reeds of ideas and allusion. Life darts beneath the surface of the book as metaphor and ways of seeing. A book lacking these or unable to conjure them as I read is like a stream made sterile, made waste and lifeless by industry. This description fits my reception of Warren's slim volume of poetry. I read these poems till my eyes blurred, till the morning and the coffee were exhausted. Last night I read in bed until my head emptied. Most of her meaning, shy as the left twisting away through the eddies, can't be grasped. Because comprehension escapes, because resonance sinks to the bottom, because its murk doesn't throw back reflection, because it doesn't cause any of those in me, it's essentially sterile. Or I am. I tell myself it's okay. Poetry is everywhere. Occasionally I see a glint in a morning editorial. This morning I saw the poetry of a cardinal pair on a branch. Maybe there are as many as a hundred thousand published poets I've never heard of. I couldn't hold this one, Rosanna Warren. She leaked through my cupped hands like sterile water.
September 27, 2018
3 1/4 stars
April 2, 2016
Even just a few poems in, I realized that I am in the hands of a master. These poems shouldn't be read but pondered slowly, word by word, sound by sound.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews