The Mystery of Meteors

By Eleanor Lerman

Book Overview

"Eleanor Lerman's 1970s books, Armed Love and Come the Sweet By and By, contained some of the most powerful, beautiful, and original poems ever written by an American poet. It was not amiss to summon comparison with Dickinson, Rimbaud, and Rilke (today we could add Paul Celan). Then, a Rimbaudian blank, twenty plus years of silence. Now, amazingly, Eleanor Lerman is back, a different poet, quieter, older, 'wiser, ' more earthly yet still brilliant, a coruscating daughter of the poet of the Seventies. What luck for American literature." --Richard Stein

"Eleanor Lerman's poems in The Mystery of Meteors, as passionately questing as her brilliant early work, inhabit a vastly larger literal and emotional landscape. The momentum of Lerman's long cadences, the sureness and fluency of her syntax, the pithiness of her unmistakably American speech, are pleasures in themselves. They serve a vision steeped in paradox, as certain of the joy of 'life, life, life going on' as of the unresolvable ancient questions these poems articulate with intelligence and authority. I'm moved to hear this poet's voice again. Eleanor Lerman is a great and gifted original." --Joan Larkin

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889330558
• ISBN13: 9781889330556
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Amazing work!!!

I thought that this contained some of the most skillfully written poetry I've ever read. It's a must read!

Wonderful

I found this book in Dallas TX. Don't know exactly why I bought it, but I'm so glad I did. I've been reading a lot of poetry this spring of 2001 (Merrill's collected, Ashbery's 'your name here', Horace in Latin and translated). And the poems in this book hold up very well with that company. The Booklist review is a little too dry I think. The poems are wonderfully human in their insights, images, and their ease. Very inviting to read alone (or out loud to someone else). One of my favorites is 'Magazine Street'. I think I must have stood in the same spot in the same airport with the same silly trinkets on my first visit to NOLA. The poems about travel are all glowing, whether she's traveling in a park, or to some domestic city.