Flying Blind: Poems

By Sharon Bryan

Book Overview

"Sharon Bryan's third collection reveals a clever, ironically detached curiosity about how human beings mediate experience through language. Whatever personal emotions underlie these witty, deftly-crafted poems are transcended by Byran's rationalism and her focus on how we have 'invented words to keep the world / just out of reach.'--Poetry

"Reading the poems of Flying Blind] is like watching a trapeze artist suspended between one flying bar and another, framed by the essential element of air. I found myself laughing, delighting in Sharon Bryan's original turn of mind, spinning on her surface wit. And I found myself saddened by a generalized sense of loss that incorporates my own. At the deepest level, Sharon Bryan's terrain resides in each of us."-The Georgia Review

"The finely crafted, intelligent poems in Bryan's third collection concern the relationships or perceived relationships between life and death, the living and the dead, and, more urgently, our struggles to communicate on the subject. . . . These poems require bravery, compassion, and patience, for they are difficult, painful, and not always self-disclosing. Their deeply personal literary and spiritual drama is at times prayerful, at times macabre, and at times almost celebratory."-poetry calendar

Flying Blind is Sharon Bryan's third collection of poems. The first two, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, were published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton, 1993). Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0964115174
• ISBN13: 9780964115170
• Release Date: July 1996
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A fun and elegant book by a first-rate poet.

Sharon Bryan has a superb feel for words and a distinct original way of looking at things. All of the poems here are worth reading, and many of them are brilliant.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"

I usually take particular interest in the title poem of a collection. Sometimes it completely encapsulates the poet's point of view--sometimes it ties together several loose themes within the book. At eighteen lines (narrow lines at that) "Flying Blind" is one of the shortest poems in the book. It is short and tight, with monosyllabic words dominating the poem Each word like an attention getting clap--especially in the first line, "We can't quite see". The harsh vowel sounds give power and directness. Larger words come later in the poem as the ideas become more complex and abstract in lines such as "to serenade the universe". "Flying Blind" explains that we know the world and the universe only through our words, and that as we "fly" through it all we only really have our language to guide us. The voice of the narrator is speaking with the authority of a director of a production, speaking from offstage to explain the principle idea behind the scene. With the exception of "Frankly", "Trimmings" and "What Biology is all About" it is hard to say exactly where the narrator is in this collection of poems. In fact, it is almost like a "Where's Waldo" book--she is usually in the position of one in a crowd, rarely referring to herself as an individual. It feels as though she is one of us (sometimes speaking for us) referring to "we" "us" and "our" as a collective humanity, and when "you" is used, it refers to all of us, as though we are being addressed by this Poet/Teacher conglomerate who is sharing wisdom. An example of this conglomerate voice is in the poem "Foreseeing". The audience is not inclusive of the narrator, although she is present in the form of voice. While there is no "I" in this poem, there is a sort of omniscient "eye", one that is not present in all of the poems, but in a few (such a as in "Beholden", "Bemused", "Minutiae" and "Theory". In these poems there is "you". Her omniscient voice in "Foreseeing" has a strange sense of personal knowledge. The voice is one of experience, one that is intimate with age. The poem made me think of writing on a wall, perhaps carved into marble--speaking a truth to us amongst the statues--perhaps like proverbs deemed absolute and universal. What does "we" and "us" do? As I was reading these poems I found myself buying into the ideas presented, and I was able to relate to the narrator in a strangely personal (strange because she seems so impersonal) way. I found myself thinking "Oh, she's one of us", sparing me from a large condescending tone explaining how the world works(like the Wizard of Oz). I feel as though I am on Sharon's team with all the "we" togetherness, as though she is the woman sitting next to me who happened to speak for us all. I have to wonder what her purpose for distancing herself from her poetry is-- and what purpose that serves for her in the process. I wonder if she feels a distance between herself and her poems, or perhaps a fear of intimacy with her