Refuge

By Belle Waring

Book Overview

Winner of the 1989 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry "Waring's poems forcibly avoid the workshop warp. From the opening, her language lashes. . . . Anyone would be convinced of both her originality and her toughness. . . . Waring uses tactics that women singers have known about for a long time: the balm of the work song and the empowering sounds a brassy belter makes as she sings of a tough life that earns her a living." --Voice Literary Supplement

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822954419
• ISBN13: 9780822954415
• Release Date: November 1990
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

I loved this book. Thank you for your customer reviews.

I love the written word but sometimes find it difficult to express myself. Of this book, I will just use a quote from the author to describe what I experienced reading these poems. "Listen--I'm not romantic, baby, but I do know grace when I see it."

Poems Like Fresh Jazz

Reading Belle Waring's "Refuge" is like listening to jazz singer Rickie Lee Jones. While taking unflinching looks at the reality around them, both artists run through ranges of expression from traditional love lyrics to Mack-the-Knife hipness; from torch songs to modern jazz experiments. Both use elements of bebop, beat poetry, funk, and the next new thing out on the street that is just beginning to work its way into the frontal lobe of popular culture. Both draw us into their experiences of abuse, love, hate, compassion, loneliness, despair, and joy through fresh imagery composed from profound personal insight. Their rhythms and moods compel us to listen to the next lyric, and the next, and the next, until unexpectedly the last phrase sounds and fades, leaving our heads still nodding in agreement, and leaving us with a difficult choice: Do we go back and listen again? Or do we simply sink back, satiated? Dan Everman

Poems Like Fresh Jazz

Reading Belle Waring's "Refuge" is like listening to jazz singer Rickie Lee Jones. While taking unflinching looks at the reality around them, both artists run through ranges of expression from traditional love lyrics to Mack-the-Knife hipness; from torch songs to modern jazz experiments. Both use elements of bebop, beat poetry, funk, and the next new thing out on the street that is just beginning to work its way into the frontal lobe of popular culture. Both draw us into their experiences of abuse, love, hate, compassion, loneliness, despair, and joy through fresh imagery composed from profound personal insight. Their rhythms and moods compel us to listen to the next lyric, and the next, and the next, until unexpectedly the last phrase sounds and fades, leaving our heads still nodding in agreement, and leaving us with a difficult choice: Do we go back and listen again? Or do we simply sink back, satiated? Dan Everman