Premium Hammered Dulcimer Musical Instrument - Award-Winning Handcrafted Folk Music Harp | Perfect for Folk Performances, Music Therapy & Home Decor
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Product Description
Lisa William's poems are infused with what John Hollander calls "a guarded wonder." A poet of unique vision, she seems always to be "looking at," with special attention to the experience of the senses. Moreover, Williams is equally concerned with epistemology—the how of seeing. And it is perhaps this quality of attention that informs her interest in the formulations of poetry itself, in its constructed dimension. Her control of the line, of rhythmic possibilities, of structures both formal and free, is evident in every poem. Together, William's original voice and her poetic finesse allow her to create those harmonies of wonder evoked by the very instrument, the hammered dulcimer, that gives her collection its name. Judge for the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award was John Hollander, poet, critic, professor. Long a major figure in American letters, Hollander was a personal friend to May Swenson, and has influenced the work of many of our best emerging poetic voices.
Customer Reviews
I don't know of any poet of the younger generation whose aims and voice are as distinctive as Lisa Williams'. A lot of poetry these days consists of naïve (or else ironic or heavily stylized and encrypted) self-expression, but Williams' best poems are often more like acts of the imagination in the seriously playful mode that Stevens perfected--they are poems "of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice," to use his phrase. Like Moore and Bishop, Williams pays intensely vivid and particularized homage to the things of the world in a voice that can be bracingly informal even when pushing the boundaries of currently accepted dictions and styles or when challenging the reader intellectually. At once enigmatic and evocative, speculative and lyrical, visionary and grounded, Williams' best poems manage to sound both carefully made and improvisatory. In an odd way they can sometimes seem akin to both formalist and "spoken word" currents in poetry today. I'm glad to see on Amazon.com that Williams has a new book coming out in the spring. Among the ten or twelve new poems I've seen in magazines over the last few years have been several amazing meditations or imaginative riffs on subjects like sea creatures or the sun or cosmological phenomena, one or two very musical themes-and-variations (in the mode of Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West," perhaps) and a handful of autobiographical poems--though even in those Williams never descends into the triviality or exhibitionism of confessional poetry.
