Bøger af Elizabeth Seydel Morgan

This fourth collection of poems by Morgan deals with the illness and death of a beloved man, and the unanswered questions that are inevitably raised by the experience of grief. Still, there are affirmations of a life of the imagination and a life of love here as well. Morgan demands answers to our questions about mortality, all the while believing that there are none. This is a collection about both life's uncertainty and its promise.

On Long Mountain one can hike a stretch of the Appalachian Trail or walk the old wagon road that Shenandoah farmers traveled to deliver their goods over the Blue Ridge Mountains east to the James River markets. Also on Long Mountain is the log house where Elizabeth Seydel Morgan wrote, or was inspired to write, many of the poems in this collection.

In her second collection of verse Elizabeth Seydel Morgan establishes herself as a poet of fierce honesty and originality. The Governor of Desire examines the world through the lens of our emotions, a perspective from which we see how everything connects--nature, politics, passion, terror, anger, grief. Morgan's poems are miracles of perception and grace. They shine with the sort of luster that comes only with unrelenting rigor and flawless craftsmanship. Tough yet tender, haunting yet lyrical, they are remarkable fusions--like governed desire--of form and content. The lean, sure syncopation, for instance, of "Do You Remember Where You Were?" deftly juggles recollections of the Beatles' first hit recording and reflections on the raw violence of our recent history. The elegiac "What Is the Most Elvis Ever Weighed?" introduces a topic we expect to be played as farce but that develops into a heart-breaking evocation of lives adrift, of dreams confounded, of youth and beauty vanished. In "Bear in Mind," the ingenuity and complexity of Morgan's comparisons mute our growing sense of unease, and make the sudden shift from metaphor to reality--"when the towering nightmare/ blacks out the stars"--all the more terrifying. Morgan's startling imagery seems not only natural but inevitable, as in "Define Space," in which the stark absence of a loved one is personified as a kind of spiritualist of negation: Space is not what is not, nor the object of rockets;>It's the cold blue absence of you>Space is the lively medium-- that made-up lady we have trouble believing, who goes into a trance of not-being, rolls her eyes toward the place where you could have gone>Alive with mystery and beauty, these poems illuminate the vicissitudes of our common experience. They are the mark of a writer of rare gifts.

The poems in Elizabeth Morgan's first full-length collection celebrate the joy and confront the contradictions of human relationships, the heart's capacity to expand with love or contract with sorrow and pain.

Through the poems in Spans, Elizabeth Seydel Morgan examines life from the perspective of one who appreciates the complexities of the world but finds pleasure in events as predictable as the changing of the seasons or as uncomplicated as a visit to an art museum.