[…]
"The task
Was how to write birch when I saw the crumbling,
pale tusk
Of a fallen mastodon bridging the path, or ash,
when the air
Was frenzied with the head of a neighbor’s
rain-black mare.
Sycamore waved at me like drowned Ophelia’s
hair."
-from “October”
Melissa Green's debut collection,
The Squanicook Eclogues, was honored
with prizes from the Poetry Society of America
and the Academy of American Poets on its first
publication by Norton in 1987. Now, in 2010, the
volume is being reprinted by Pen & Anvil Press.
In the four elegies of The Squanicook Eclogues,
Green examines how "duty and devotion are
the same when love and terror walk together."
From her father, so familiar with the "iconography
of trees," Green's young speaker learns how
to catalogue the flora and fauna with a meticulous
eye. As Joseph Brodsky noted, Green has written
"wonderful eclogues ... Virgil would be proud."
Praise for The Squanicook
Eclogues:
“Here, by the grace
and wisdom of the language in which rhyme rhymes
with time, comes the poet who commits everything
she touches to your memory ... In these eclogues,
the New England flora seems to have finally
acquired the power of speech.” –
Joseph Brodsky
“Responsibility and
delight are the tone of the true poet, a joy
in the craft that supercedes its themes, however
afflicted, and on every page of this book Melissa
Green’s reverential elations uplift and
soothe the reader as naturally and cleanly as
the morning wind.” – Derek Walcott
“No other young poet
is so contented, so thrilled, merely to catalogue
nature’s changes, or to craft them into
a deliberately turned formal verse that takes
an almost shocked delight in its own daring.”
– William Logan
Additional excerpts from The
Squanicook Eclogues can be read online at
AGNI,
and at the Poetry
Center at Smith College.
About the author
Melissa Green is the recipient
of both the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry
Society of America and the Lavan Award from the
Academy of American Poets. She is the author of
three books: The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton, 1988), Color
is the Suffering of Light (Norton, 1995),
andFifty-two
(Arrowsmith, 2007). She has recently finished
Akeldama, a book-length lyrical work
about Heloïse and Abélard. Her poems
have appeared in journals including The
New Republic, AGNI
and the inaugural issue of Little
Star. Green lives beside the sea in Winthrop,
Massachusetts.
Her collection Daphne in
Mourning is also available from Pen &
Anvil.
