Meteoric Flowers

By Elizabeth Willis

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819568139
• ISBN13: 9780819568137
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up