A01=Betty Adcock
Author_Betty Adcock
Category=DCF
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Product details
- ISBN 9780807120231
- Weight: 200g
- Dimensions: 153 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 1995
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In The Difficult Wheel, Betty Adcock writes about time, about losing the past yet never being able to lose it. Hers are poems about vanishings, about grief, and about folly, our absurd attempt to cancel time and space, to abstract ourselves out of history and out of nature, and to distract ourselves from death's specter.
Adcock's verses fuse formal pattern with the chaos of rapid change, music with grief, the world's presences, deer, bird, fox, all that shakes the ""shuddering loom"", with the absences that time has dreamed and language must confront. Out of her personal losses Adcock imagines the larger ones we are facing at the end of the twentieth century.
But there are celebrations here, too: a simple field of wild flowers on an Aegean island becomes music, memory, a ""pearl of great price."" A woman caring for injured birds in her backyard aviary keeps ""bits of heaven's weather, pieces of the sky"", and because of her earthbound love, they will rise.
Arresting language and challenging vision distinguish these poems and this poet.
Adcock's verses fuse formal pattern with the chaos of rapid change, music with grief, the world's presences, deer, bird, fox, all that shakes the ""shuddering loom"", with the absences that time has dreamed and language must confront. Out of her personal losses Adcock imagines the larger ones we are facing at the end of the twentieth century.
But there are celebrations here, too: a simple field of wild flowers on an Aegean island becomes music, memory, a ""pearl of great price."" A woman caring for injured birds in her backyard aviary keeps ""bits of heaven's weather, pieces of the sky"", and because of her earthbound love, they will rise.
Arresting language and challenging vision distinguish these poems and this poet.
Betty Adcock is Kenan Writer-in-Residence at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her previous books of poetry are Walking Out, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; Nettles, winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award; and Beholdings, winner of the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award. She is also the recipient of the James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah magazine.
