Meteoric Flowers

A bold poetic intervention into the pastoral tradition.

Elizabeth Willis's new collection is a stunning collision of the pastoral tradition with the politics of the post-industrial age. These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 03/30/2006
ISBN: 9780819568137
Pages: 94
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 8.06h x 6.34w x 0.55d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 04/03/2006 pg. 41
Library Journal 05/01/2006 pg. 92