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Grave of Light
New and Selected Poems, 1970–2005
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2008-08-26
388 Pages, 7.00 x 9.25 in
Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet
Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles—an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.
Author's Note
from Love Poems
"2/? Saturday"
Friday Midnight Exactly
Cold Poem
I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year
from 165 Meeting House Lane
1.
4.
15.
22.
Dear Dark Continent
Incidentals in the Day World
Your Dailiness
But He Says I Misunderstood
from Songs for the Unborn Second Baby
from I
"Alice ordered me to be made"
The Virtue of Uncreatedness
Endless Day
30th Birthday
January
How Spring Comes
Little Egypt
Sonnet
A California Girlhood
Poem ("St. Mark's Place caught at night in hot summer,")
When I Was Alive
After Tsang Chih
Today
You
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
Untitled
"If she says that she's the goddess Fortune"
The World, All That Live & All That Occur
Bus Stop
Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice
The Locket
September's Book
A True Account of Talking to Judy Holiday, October 13
Poem ("You hear that heroic big land music?")
The Prophet
Desert for All of Music to Take Place
Untitled ("Clouds, big ones oh it's")
Flowers of the Foothills & Mountain Valleys
World's Bliss
Waltzing Matilda
Untitled ("All my life,")
Postcards
White Evening Primrose
Memorial Day
Margaret and Dusty
La Mort
Congratulating Wedge
The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books
So Much
Poem ("Why do I want to tell it")
Love,
It Would
Weekend Weather
At Night the States
from Parts of a Wedding
"Corpus Sagrada"
"in this Paradise"
I the People
"in the dark I"
"More important than having been born is your city"
from Beginning with a Stain
"Beginning with a stain, as the Universe did perhaps"
"I will never not make a sound not have made a sound"
"Some people refuse to remember, & I"
"Against all agony a bunch of flowers in the chest"
"born in beauty born a loved one, before history"
"They say something ruinous & tragic happened soon after"
"Speaking firstly forever"
"You haven't saved me any time"
'What does she think?'
Homer's Art
Mother Mask
White Phosphorus
from The Descent of Alette - [from Book One]
"One day, I awoke" "& found myself on"
"There was a woman" "in a station"
"We couldn't find" "our fathers—"
"A mother" "& child"
"When I was born," "I was born now"
"I once" "found an exit"
"A car" "awash with blood"
"I stood again" "on the platform"
[from Book Three]
"'It's time to go,' he said" "'Go where?'"
"As I stared down" "into the black lake"
"The horizontal" "black void"
"Talons tore me," "tore my flesh"
"When I awoke I" "was in darkness"
"'We will be silent" "& wait'"
"I looked into the light" "directly"
from Close to Me & Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven)
"I have to . . . talk to you. I have to tell you . . ."
"I sit mute Nothing mutely"
"They gave me, it seemed to me, an Initiation"
"Why do we make"
"When I say to you—I, almost, transfer a shape"
"In eternity There is no story"
"I'm . . . interested in, what of me there is . . . here."
"I'm going to tell you . . . a story."
"I don't have to"
from Désamère - [from Amère and Desnos]
'I dream,' says dead desert Desnos"
"'See this piece of amber?' Amère says to Brother"
"Desnos says, 'I dream I don't die"
[from Desert Poems]
I
II
III
from Mysteries of Small Houses
Would Want to Be in My Wildlife
One of the Longest Times
As Good as Anything
Choosing Styles—1972
I Must Have Called and So He Comes
The Trouble with You Girls
Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980)
Mid-80's
Sept 17/Aug 29, '88
1992
Lady Poverty
from Disobedience
Circorpse
Help Me Corpus Sagrada
The Islanders Remember That There Are no Women and no Men
Red Fish
Enuma Elish
from Reason and Other Women
Amid These Words I Can Know
Parable of Christian
Moses and the Burning Bush
Jone Jonah
Leaves
Grave of Light
Where Leftover Misery Goes
from Benediction
City
Love
Iphigenia
from Alma, or The Dead Women
Radical Feminist
Beloved Earth Restrain Them
Discredited
Oath
And Who Is Crying
Cherokee
Decomposition
Ballad
from In the Pines
14
from Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
"There was power in that room. I saw"
"The ghoul-girl. There was one to care for"
"What she reports against you isn't"
"The city I founded I will found again"
"What were you doing when I thought you were dead"
"If you meet me here I was Lady"
"Walking away turns to look over shoulder"
"Black sequins compression"
"I stand here in whose eyes"
"Woman with antlers, deer-headed antlered woman"
"If there's change you put it into this sculpture's slot"
"Justice may appear in the"
"No world is intact"
List of Poems by Titles of First Publication
Index of Titles and First Lines
ALICE NOTLEY has published more than twenty collections of poems. Her Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.
"Her work displays a lucid sense of humor and a debt to William Carlos Williams."
~The New Yorker
"Notley developed her own ways of treating feminist thought, high and popular culture, and personal themes. This collection restores to print much of the unavailable work of this underground hero."
~Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2006
"Always innovative and occasionally maudlin, the poems in Notley's latest book play haphazardly with figures of sound and speech. Showing the influence of ee cummings and William Carlos Williams, these free-verse poems are written as letters, postcards, and prose-paragraphs. ...In one of the most evocative and representative poems here, "Choosing Styles-1972", Notley suggests both the metaphorical and the emotional territory of her work. As she muses on the process of her poetry...she arrives at her subject: death. Although the ending evokes an uneasy resonance with ee cummings, it also shows Notley's talent for finishing a poem as opposed to merely stopping it."
~Library Journal
"Notley's oeuvre is a rich field for exploration, and The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is a wonderful place to start."
~David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review
"This monumental book features selected work by Alice Notley, one of America's most enduring poets. Notley has strengthened and redefined alternative forms to traditional modes of writing. Her poetry is autobiographical but her linguistic and experimental skills carpet the personal with a timeless vision that transforms the deaths of family and loved ones into poetic dimensions of grief and startling revelation. Over the decades, Notley has built a rich body of work that cannot be categorized or contained in a complex poetic community. Her poems sing of commitment and the daring steps it takes to move away from the predetermined forms toward a level of discourse that fills fresh pages with nobility and courage."
~The Bloomsbury Review
"The inexhaustible reach and ceaseless invention of Notley's vision make Grave of Light a thrilling testament to her greatest poetic gift: an unwavering faith in poetry's power to change the real."
~Brian Teare, Boston Journal
"This wondrous tome is a calling to a higher purpose, where the poet is a seer and communes with the powers of universe—beyond the grave—through sinewy imagination, and energetically charged language."
~Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Politics
"Alice Notley is a visionary poet overshadowed by no one. These poems are consistently feminist and anti-war in spirit, yet Notley's merciless honesty ensures they are never predictable."
~Rae Armantrout, author of Up To Speed
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