Book Description
Since the mid-1970s, Ann Lauterbach has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, loss and the unexpected (the title poem was written directly in response to witnessing the events of 9/11) play against the reassurances of repetition and narrative story. By turns elegant, fierce, and sensuous, her musically charged poems move from the pictorial or imagistic to a heightened sense of the aural or musical in order to depict the world humming with vibrations of every kind from every source—the world as a form of life. From "Hum" Things are incidental. Someone is weeping. I weep for the incidental. The days are beautiful. Where is tomorrow? Everyone will weep. Tomorrow was yesterday. The days are beautiful.
About the Author
Ann Lauterbach is currently Schwab Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College, where she also directs the writing division of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. As well as receiving Guggenheim, New York State Foundation for the Arts, and Ingram Merrill Fellowships, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently If in Time.
Hum FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, Ann Lauterback configures her lyricism against calamity, ideas of order against chance dispersal, retrieval against loss. These poems bring the reader to the crux where public events impinge on personal reception, and the act of listening is understood as our hope for engagement and response.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
"Maybe what is interesting will also be beautiful," writes Lauterbach at the opening of her seventh collection of poems, knowingly marking out a world that exists after beauty, after emotion, after nature-after everything that traditionally makes poetry. Her speaker is determined to make the absence of beauty beautiful without being postmodern; the poems are abstract and slippery, and yield their meanings with reluctant late modernist grace. The book is organized into three sections, the first attending chiefly to sound, the second to visual art, the third to 9/11. The poems limn a space somewhere between the world-as-given and the ideal, concentrating on language's dual relationship to experience, "[a]s if `life' could touch its metaphors." The title poem addresses 9/11 in a series of simple declarative sentences, which repeat at intervals: "The days are beautiful./ The towers are yesterday." A poem about a Malevich painting argues for abstraction always derived from the concrete: "the square was only/ a boy with his knapsack/ a woman crossing his path." When her speaker, at intervals, simply gives it up ("I'm lonely for the integrity of sacred life, not religion, but love's/ trove, its coil around sex"), the hum of this book becomes a chorus of angels. (Apr.) FYI: Penguin will also publish Lauterbach's The Night Sky, a prose collection centering on the column she wrote for the American Poetry Review 1996-1999 ($25.95 272p ISBN 0-670-03410-X; May). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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