The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems (Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry)
Description
The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown’s deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown’s poems call on Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and Beethoven. They stand before the Venus de Milo as well as the moon, as they measure distances between what we make as art and who we are as humans. In wide-ranging forms—from the sestina to prose poems—they focus on the natural world as well as the Delaware legislature and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton.
The Woods Are On Fire includes nearly fifty new poems, along with poems selected from seven previous books, showcasing an influential American poet’s work over the last few decades.
Praise for The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems (Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry)
"This is the kind of light-filled book we use to see the world more clearly and make our way forward—and we do it with a poem in each hand, as Kooser recommends."—Julie Larios, Numero Cinq
"The complexities and complications of the poet who is among and yet stands back, and who understands the limits of life yet yearns and hungers for everything life has within it, are offered in The Woods Are On Fire, and the pleasures and challenges of great poetry can both be found in this necessary book by Fleda Brown."—Adrian Koesters, Split Rock Review
“Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present.”—World Literature Today
