Bøger af Dorianne Laux

From "a poet of immense insight and masterful craft" (Kwame Dawes), Finger Exercises for Poets is an engaging and inspiriting invitation to practice poetry alongside one of its masters. With wide-ranging examples from classic and contemporary poets, Dorianne Laux demystifies the magic of language that makes great poetry and offers generative exercises to harness that magic. She explores the syllable and the line, the use of form, poetic responses to contemporary events and personal experiences, the imaginative leap, and the power of a distinct voice. As she writes in the introduction, "My instrument is the immensity of language.... There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.... I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me."Throughout, Laux reminds us that poetry is a practice as much as an art and that poets must hone their language as a musician practicing an instrument.

In her seventh collection, Dorianne Laux once again offers poems that move us, include us, and appreciate us fully as the flawed humans we are. Life on Earth is a book of praise for our planet and ourselves, delivered with Laux's trademark vitality, frank observation, and earthy wisdom.With odes to the unlikely and elemental-salt, snow, crows, cups, Bisquick, a shovel and rake, the ubiquitous can of WD-40, "the way / it releases the caught cogs / of the world"-Life on Earth urges us all to find extraordinary magic in the mess of ordinary life. "One of our most daring contemporary poets" (Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle), Laux balances wonder at the night sky and the taste of a ripe peach with recognition of the sharp knife of mortality. The volume includes powerful homages to the poet's mother and her carpenter's spirit, reflections on loss and aging, and encounters with the fleeting beauty of the natural world.Transcending life's inevitable moments of pain and uncertainty, Life on Earth instructs us in our own endless possibilities and the astonishing riches of the world around us.

Dorianne Laux's fifth collection of poetry peels back time to the summer of love and the Vietnam War. Her keen hindsight uncovers the humanity at the center of conflict with language that goes straight to the heart. This work stands as an elegy for the loss of innocence, an homage to the glimmer underneath the urban grunge, and a love song to the imperfections that unite and divide us. Laux possesses what Tony Hoagland calls "the brave art of looking," with an immediate and compassionate touch.

A collection of new and selected works from a prize-winning poet known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian.

Dorianne Laux's poetry is a poetry of risk; it goes to the very edge of extinction to find the hard facts that need to be sung. What We Carry includes poems of survival, poems of healing, poems of affirmation and poems of celebration. Sculptured, fluid and generous, they reveal a poet whose vision is informed by experience and caring. Of her poetry and poetic odyssey, critic William O'Daly writes: "It seems that Ms. Laux has chosen to witness what she must on her journey, in some way reliving and weaving together who she was and who she is to fully reclaim her body and soul ... The poems seem to have been well prepared for, born of years of hard work, careful listening, patience, until all the notes rang true". That attention to precision of image, language and sound, that pursuit of honesty and love is What We Carry - our lives, worth having, and worth transforming.

Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary life into extraordinary and complex tapestries.

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."-Philip Levine

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."-Philip Levine