The Bird Catcher

by Marie Ponsot

In 1998, Marie Ponsot was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, confirming the praise that has been bestowed on her by critics and peers--among them Eavan Boland and Carolyn Kizer (who are quoted on the back of the book jacket) and Amy Clampitt, who had this to say of Ponsot's last "She is marvelously attuned to the visual and to the audible. She is no less precisely a geographer of the interior life, above all the experience of being a woman."

Genres: Poetry, Adult

91 pages, Hardcover

First published February 10, 1998

About the author

Marie Ponsot was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.

After graduating from St. Joseph's College for Women in Brooklyn, Ponsot earned her master's degree in seventeenth-century literature from Columbia University. After the Second World War, she journeyed to Paris, where she met and married Claude Ponsot, a painter and student of Fernand Léger. The couple lived in Paris for three years, during which time they had a daughter. Later, Ponsot and her husband relocated to the United States. The couple had six sons before divorcing.

Upon returning from France, Ponsot worked as a freelance writer of radio and television scripts. She also translated 69 children's books from the French, including The Fables of La Fontaine.

She co-authored with Rosemary Deen two books about the fundamentals of writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk and Common Sense.

Ponsot taught a poetry thesis class, as well as writing classes, at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at the YMCA, Beijing United University, New York University, and Columbia University, and she served as an English professor at Queens College in New York, from which she retired in 1991.

Ponsot lived in New York City.

Ponsot was the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Book Review.

Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2015 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Reviews

[Honesty · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a couple of poems I really enjoyed, but for the most part, this collection was a slog. You could sum up almost all the poems here as being about pregnancy, loneliness, and suicide. Interestingly, the suicide ones were usually the best, perhaps because the author really had something to say. The rest seemed like pointless rambles with punctuation breaks. Granted, there were some really interesting stanzas in here, but that wasn't enough to save these poems.
I was so excited for this collection after reading the glowing reviews on here. I guess I went in expecting too much.
2.25 stars

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Death is breath-taking."
So obvious and yet she makes it worth saying.
And the last (death-rich) section was especially so for me. "Write lost as cost; spell fond, spell fund, spell found;" -- I'll stop here so I don't spoil it for you. (Yowza I loved that stanza.)

I like the regularness of her forms, and the inset stanzas. They seem to know they need to be there. And I love her eye which is so bright and keen.

[Meaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many dense poems but with lovely language all the same.
.
My favorites from the collection:
-"To the Muse of Doorways Edges Verges"
-"The Title's Last"
-"We Are Imagined"
-"Around a Beautiful Theory"
-"Two Questions"
-"Winter"

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too many gardens, Eden and otherwise, but it had its moments. Like this one:

ONE IS ONE

Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world--though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages.

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent

since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.
Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,
and joy may come, and make its test of us.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whatever she is writing about, Ponsot has her way with her words. They sing. Perhaps my favorite poem, because of the last word in it, is “Persephone, Packing.” She writes of her dream, “It can’t die out or blossom; / it’s stuck in autumn, impacted, / its roots spidered, replete, / like the bulb narcissus, / like daffodil & hyacinth in bulb, / or tulips, daughtering.”

[Mills College Library]

811.54 P799b 1998

[Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh I couldn't get enough of this brilliance

[Mary Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poem was "A Determined Present."

Thank you, Julie Larios, for introducing me to this poet!!

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my standard. While I may never reach Ponsot's level, I can at least dream.