Title

Blue Window: Poems

Creator

Ann Fisher-Wirth, University of Mississippi

Preview

Creation Date

8-1-2003

Description

By Ann Fisher-Wirth Archer Books (Paperback, $14.00, ISBN: 1931122156, 8/2003) “In that shadowy time before sorrow…” the title poem of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Blue Window begins, invoking a young girl’s world of befores: before sexual and political awareness; before loss, grief, and guilt; before deaths in the neighborhood and the family. Fisher-Wirth continues tracing a series of journeys begun at that time. An Army brat and lifelong traveler who grew up in California and now lives in Mississippi; daughter, lover, wife, and mother; environmentalist, literature professor, and student of yoga and Reiki, Ann Fisher-Wirth writes out of the full range of her experience. Grounded in the body and the earth, Blue Window mourns and celebrates what it is to be alive. “Many American poets have written what gets called ‘the autobiographical lyric.’ Very few poets have written it with such fierce and stinging accuracy. [Ann Fisher-Wirth] is, stylistically, a realist and a modernist. Like William Carlos Williams … she can be a little headlong, perhaps a little ruthless, and that quality gives this book, which also has the virtues of tenderness and attentiveness, its steel and its nerve.” —Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, author, most recently, of the collection Sun Under Wood “Sweet, rank, precise, unafraid of either deep pain or deep joy, these poems remind me of horses in a pasture, always aware of their power and grace, even in repose, and always, completely natural. It is not just the poet who is acutely alive, in this work, but, somehow, the poems themselves.” —Rick Bass, Author, The Hermit’s Story: Stories, The Roadless Yaak, and others. Ann Fisher-Wirth lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she teaches poetry and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature and of numerous essays on American literature, and a Fulbright Scholar who in 2002-2003 held the Chair of American Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. She and her husband Peter Wirth have five children.

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