Basic Heart: Poems

by Renee Ashley

 Basic Heart is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."

 

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2009

About the author

Renée Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry: Salt (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Various Reasons of Light, The Revisionist's Dream (Avocet Press, 1998), and a chapbook, The Museum of Lost Wings (Hill-Stead Museum Press). She is also the author of the novel Someplace Like This (Permanent Press, 2003). She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a contributing editor to The Literary Review, and is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Marylisa DeDomenicis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this immediately and devoured it -- and although I don't regret that I read it so quickly, I can't wait to go back and savour it. I'm mostly grateful for it -- almost joyful at what it is not. The last line of the first poem is just so perfect. The poems "I Have Been Told You Would Like More Story" and "Interpreting For The Madman," as well as many of the other poems are filled with a dark humor, a near-humor, an off-humor that Renee trusts I'll get. And oh, I so do. I, personally, don't need more story, thankyouverymuch. What's been offered is quite effective, and yes, so, so basic, it feels embedded. Thanks for this!

[R.G. Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selected lines: "O, poem, I have never seen a mirror like you."

"What dies before // the heavy body follows?"

"My end-stopped heart."

"What rises can be / Saved, what is saved just might turn beautiful."

All the mystery that makes poetry's eternal return irresistible. Poems like these remind us that we need to wake up and write more poems of our own.