My Shining Archipelago

By Talvikki Ansel

Book Overview

Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, ""Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin."" This cycle of ""freewheeling sonnets"" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300070322
• ISBN13: 9780300070323
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 70 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

She shells see shells by the sea sure

Telvicki Ansel communicates the multiple awareness of self, nature, and the unmanefest. She can have you hold a pear as she has held it, and feel the humorous frustration of raising miniature horses. "My Shining Archipelago" is a real find.