 |
Cynthia Zarin's The Watercourse (2002) is a collection of poems about the breakage of divorce and the re-forming of family that follows. What happens when love ends, or changes? Zarin addresses such questions in striking poetic forms, among them the adult nursery rhyme below.
| |
Fury
I saw Fury on the stair,
Beak in my heart,
But no one's there.
I saw Fury rattle a chair.
Crack in the mirror,
Cart drags the mare—
How does love stop?
How does it start?
I saw Fury all in satin.
"How can he love her?"
Asked the black wren.
"Sky fell down," said Mrs. Hen.
Where the crow flies
Is where it gets eaten—
Judge came back in
With a hung jury.
Black is the ribbon
On her nightgown.
Green the hangman
Who took her to town.
The table's set with fire,
Tears fill the tap—
Miracles happen
But not behind your back.
If I had a penny
Or a hundred or two,
I'd sail the world
Straight back to you.
The serpent eats a sparrow,
The wolf lies down—
Fury carries on
With a wheelbarrow.
Love blinks an eyelid,
Nothing is for sure.
Bang goes the hammer,
Echoes out the door.
Fury's whistling
The dead dark bright—
Hid star I wish
Upon the night.
|
 |
 About The Watercourse
In her third book of poetry, Cynthia Zarin, one of the finest poets of her generation, has turned her art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, Zarin, whose work has been compared to that of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, addresses the passage through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. At the book's center is a powerful sequence of love poems, in which she asks, "Is it light on the trees / that turns them to pale fire / or is it spring, come without / warning to this town on / stilts . . . ?" Whether taking a brood of children to the swimming pool, contemplating a parrot, or imagining a temperate landscape "where Orion / could shoot the bear along
the river, and miss, and miss," Zarin continually reveals beauty in subtle statements of feeling.
The Watercourse is a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection.
About Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She writes for a wide range of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, where her poems frequently appear. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and a winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Award, Zarin is an artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. She has published two previous volumes of poetry, Fire Lyric and The Swordfish Tooth, as well as several books for children.
Miss one of our daily poems? You can view them online in the Knopf Poem-a-Day archive.
|
|
|
|
Excerpt from THE WATERCOURSE. Copyright © 2002 by Cynthia Zarin. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.r.
We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to knopfwebmaster@randomhouse.com
You received this issue because your email address is in Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list. To ***, send a blank email to unsub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. Or if you received this poem as a forward and wish to subscribe, send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com.
|
|
Back to newsletter list
