Intervale: New and Selected Poems

By Betty Adcock

Book Overview

With a penetrating eye and a deep and spiritual intelligence, Betty Adcock writes poems that range from elegy to dark humor as they confront both loss and possibility. Intervale, selections from her first four books plus a new collection, traces the continuity of her vision and shows that lyric intensity can bring light to even the most obdurate darkness. Moving from the original loss of a world at her mother's death during the poet's sixth year to the world's loss of the arboreal leopards of Cambodia and Vietnam; from vanishing farmland to the endangered Sacred Harp music that once flourished in backwoods churches; from the difficult history of a little-known rural place to the weighted ruins of Greece -- these poems frame lessenings, divestations, and devastations in the midst of plenty. A wilderness disappears into cozy myth, farming into industry, tiger and elephant into zoos; the very ground underfoot, with its attendant necessities and contingencies, can seem to fade into fabrications we take for reality. The seam where such themes touch Adcock's personal history is the path these poems travel toward a harsh but luminous transcendence.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807126640
• ISBN13: 9780807126646
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 181 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

excellent work

Betty Adcock's poetry is truly wonderful. She writes with clarity, grace, humor, and anyone who reads her poems, can't help but love them. This book has some of the best poems written, like "Southbound" and "Voyages". This book is a must for every person who loves southern poetry, and I recommend it for anyone who loves poetry.