|
|
Contents
The Dark
Lines for Those to Whom Tragedy Is Denied
Five Confessions
American City
Three Dances of Death
Tinkly Song
At an Old Downtown Square
Unborn Child
Gravity
A Drawing of Darkness
The Ride
A Girl at the Center of Her Life
Of the Violence of Self-Death
Marriage
On Being Borne Reluctantly to New York State, by Train
Foetal Song
Alarms
Sleepwalking
Centuries of Lovers
To Whose Country Have I Come?
And So I Grew Up to Be Nineteen and to Murder
A Woman in Her Secret Life
Women in Love
A Rising and Sinking and Rising in My Mind
An Internal Landscape
Cupid and Psyche
In the Night
Transparencies
Like This . . . So This
Anonymous Sins
Dead Actors
A Crowded River, Sunday
Vanity
Dust-Jacket Blurb
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the best known young writers in America today. Her most notable success has been as a fiction writer. Two of her novels have been National Book Award nominees, and her short stories have appeared frequently in national magazines, literary quarterlies, and anthologies.
This volume, her first collection of poetry, will no doubt come as a surprise to many of her admirers.
Her poems are prose poems reflecting an existentialist vision of life and the nature and deterioration of human relationships. At the heart of the collection is a series of "false confessions," projections of the imagination into other "false" personalities (although even the "falsity" is perhaps only illusory). In her poetry as in her fiction Miss Oates is deeply concerned with human emotions, with both the physical and metaphysical facts and with the ultimate mysteries of human emotions.
Representing a distinctive new voice, Anonymous Sins and Other Poems is an exciting collection which will evoke a strong response from the discerning reader.
Excerpt
In the Night
In the night the sirens are rising.
All this summer night the destructive sirens move
through the dawning dark of a city not at war.
Walk to one window upstairs, then to another.
Fires at the horizon? silhouettes of a
human avalanche trembling to flow?
Is that a death squad of sirens, converging?
Do they surround a deathly building,
condemned? In the heart of the city
is a riot, not a word but the true shudder
of pavement under hundreds and the breaking
of glass: explosions performed to children's eyes.
You and I are miles away but eyeless with fear.
Their cries we cannot know, this far; only the sirens,
loosed upon them and circling, revolving, fixed
to converge upon a point . . . . "What do they want?"
No need to ask. "What will happen tomorrow?"
Will they learn our language to die in?
Reviews
Publishers Weekly, August 18, 1969, p69
Library Journal, December 1, 1969, p4440
Nation, December 1, 1969, p610
New Leader, December 8, 1969, p10-11
Canadian Forum, January 1970, p243-244
Washington Post Book World, March 8, 1970, p7
Hudson Review, Spring 1970, p182
Prairie Schooner, Summer 1970, p177-178
Choice, July-August, 1970, p686
Poetry, December 1970, p195-203
Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1970, pxiii
Revised Fri, Oct 30, 1998
|
|
