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The Drowned City
"What happens when belief-as artistic ambition, as a lover's devotion, as faith in divinity-is met with a staggering indifference? This is the question which Jennifer Atkinson's The Drowned City seeks variously to answer, and to which the poems themselves, finally, elegantly, unflinchingly become the only appropriate answer, one that does not offer closure to its questions so much as a means of fashioning a life inside them."
-from the Foreword
-from the Foreword
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2000
9 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Atkinson
22 books8 followersApart from Drift Ice (Etruscan Press, 2008), Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree (University of Alabama Press, 1990), which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City (Northeastern University Press, 2000), winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal, in Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 1, 2010
Her mentors are Donne, Dickinson, Hopkins, Frost, Rich, and Snyder. From the first three she gets her linguistic lore, her literary wild, from the fourth her evolutionary Yankeedom, from the fifth her courage-sustaining intellectual and cultural inheritance, from the sixth her ecological rip-rap.
In the first section of The Drowned City she comes on in full dress, with titles that include poetic genres and terms, Hymns, Measures, Aubades, Lines from Hart Crane, Hopkins and Montale, titles that celebrate holy days of observing her Connecticut River coastal landscape just off Long Island Sound: St. Vernoica, St. Magdalen, Solstice Eve; she imagines the materials necessary to represent a day’s landscape in draftsmanship: watercolor, graphite, crayon, and gesso. How regal is place, how indifferent is weather, how is one to be instructed by what the poet calls the “irrelevant unmeant?” Her poetic materials of representation (especially of place) seem in the author’s fullness too much, indifferently overdetermined, vaunting, baroque, and tonally all which can witness their other, unmeant effect.
On the one hand there is faith; on the other a textual tradition masculinist and yet setting irretrievably a Psychic scene; and at bay, on neither hand, as it were, there is love, both the erotic textual tradition and of a natural world to which one’s longing has insistently to refer. How does this Eros cross the wild, what in love does he steal? And how has that theft, which Atkinson figures variously in her poems, allowed the regality (masculinist or otherwise) through which the poet takes possession of her tradition?
Ethically, this teen of the Sixties commits herself to the “irrelevant unmeant effect,” into whom poetry will slip, as it slips into the 17 year old Atkinson at the periphery of a scene from her first book, the poem called “Philosophy Class” (the date must be 1972), who observes the erotic “zeroing” of the philosophy professor’s refusal to look even once at the class Beauty in their midst, as he worries like Heurtebuese over conceptualities while our poet claims her Orphic priority, that she too can get it off the wires, following out to the parking lot and listening for Beauty’s heels clack across the night. Scoping Male Violence, the author’s will to live in her post-Manson historical moment of liberation in women’s sexuality, as well as of the Psychic aberrance of rape, means she lives across these myths of poetry, knowledge, and inherited shame; in the Judges story of Samson’s unnamed first and betraying wife; in the Psyche story as being that which loves pursues; as well as in Eve’s “ignominy.” In Atkinson’s reading of Eve’s disfigurement, “she has the look, she thinks, of non-chalance.” That’s Beauty’s look. It’s also the tonality Orpheus faces us with who cannot be bothered with his betrothed’s non-chalance if he’s to get it off the wires. Atkinson fears not living in the world – that’s a mortal fear that has her searching out all the subject positions so that she does not cousin as a dupe of literary lore. But in nature, regarding the innocent, she is one who has held out another, non-Frostian, or double-standard.
In the first section of The Drowned City she comes on in full dress, with titles that include poetic genres and terms, Hymns, Measures, Aubades, Lines from Hart Crane, Hopkins and Montale, titles that celebrate holy days of observing her Connecticut River coastal landscape just off Long Island Sound: St. Vernoica, St. Magdalen, Solstice Eve; she imagines the materials necessary to represent a day’s landscape in draftsmanship: watercolor, graphite, crayon, and gesso. How regal is place, how indifferent is weather, how is one to be instructed by what the poet calls the “irrelevant unmeant?” Her poetic materials of representation (especially of place) seem in the author’s fullness too much, indifferently overdetermined, vaunting, baroque, and tonally all which can witness their other, unmeant effect.
On the one hand there is faith; on the other a textual tradition masculinist and yet setting irretrievably a Psychic scene; and at bay, on neither hand, as it were, there is love, both the erotic textual tradition and of a natural world to which one’s longing has insistently to refer. How does this Eros cross the wild, what in love does he steal? And how has that theft, which Atkinson figures variously in her poems, allowed the regality (masculinist or otherwise) through which the poet takes possession of her tradition?
Ethically, this teen of the Sixties commits herself to the “irrelevant unmeant effect,” into whom poetry will slip, as it slips into the 17 year old Atkinson at the periphery of a scene from her first book, the poem called “Philosophy Class” (the date must be 1972), who observes the erotic “zeroing” of the philosophy professor’s refusal to look even once at the class Beauty in their midst, as he worries like Heurtebuese over conceptualities while our poet claims her Orphic priority, that she too can get it off the wires, following out to the parking lot and listening for Beauty’s heels clack across the night. Scoping Male Violence, the author’s will to live in her post-Manson historical moment of liberation in women’s sexuality, as well as of the Psychic aberrance of rape, means she lives across these myths of poetry, knowledge, and inherited shame; in the Judges story of Samson’s unnamed first and betraying wife; in the Psyche story as being that which loves pursues; as well as in Eve’s “ignominy.” In Atkinson’s reading of Eve’s disfigurement, “she has the look, she thinks, of non-chalance.” That’s Beauty’s look. It’s also the tonality Orpheus faces us with who cannot be bothered with his betrothed’s non-chalance if he’s to get it off the wires. Atkinson fears not living in the world – that’s a mortal fear that has her searching out all the subject positions so that she does not cousin as a dupe of literary lore. But in nature, regarding the innocent, she is one who has held out another, non-Frostian, or double-standard.
March 21, 2019
Very neat and interesting poems <3
April 21, 2019
This was actually my poetry professor in college! :D
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews