Hemming Flames - Award-Winning Poetry Book by Swenson | Perfect for Poetry Lovers & Literary Gifts
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Product Description
Volume 19 of the May Swenson Poetry Award Series, 2016Throughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction, and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, Hemming Flames explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world.The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.
Customer Reviews
Some poetry collections are soft and soothing, some are lush, filled with imagery and metaphor. Others are intellectual, even formal, offering rhyme and rhythm. Alas, too many collections just fall flat. But in Hemming Flames the author is doing something totally inventive with language, not ignoring the usual poetic devices but going beyond them, giving us something risky and quite unlike what's happening in much of contemporary poetry. In choosing this book to win the May Swenson Award, Stephen Dunn was perhaps taking a chance, but for me, at least, this chance paid off. These poems are harrowing, sometimes mean, often shocking, sometimes so poignant it's difficult to keep reading. There's always a debate about whether poetry should be "true," all the poems representing what "really happened" in the poet's life. I've come to appreciate over the years that often what's imagined or half remembered can be as true as what's "real." I don't know if all the details in this book are actual, but taken as a whole, read from beginning to end, the narrative of this powerful work creates a world, a difficult one indeed, but one that I, in some ways, recognize from my own life. This book is not for every reader, but I believe it will be for many.
