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Product Description
Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, ""Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin."" This cycle of ""freewheeling sonnets"" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.
Amazon.com Review
Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, and many other excellent poets came to national prominence early in their careers through the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The 1996 winner, chosen by James Dickey, was Talvikki Ansel. Dickey writes that Ansel's poems evoke "the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed." The writing is beautiful, and often plays with the space between expectation and reality, as in "In Fragments, In Streams." Ansel writes: "Haley's Comet crossed the jungle sky / that April, six mornings in a row / I woke to hike out to a clearing / and never saw it." The constant expectation of "days fading / in and out of showers," the shock of biting into an apple seed ("almond taste / cyanide, the bitter hint, liqueur taste"), and other revelations of the natural world fill these pages.
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