Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems

By Susan Ludvigson

Book Overview

In new poems and old, Sweet Confluence turns and returns to themes of art, music, landscape, and family that have feathered Ludvigson's lush expressive output over the past twenty-five years. The twenty new poems resume -- Ludvigson's Wisconsin motif -- the cradle of her experience and consciousness--and use Old World European sights, her mother's death from Alzheimer's, and a southern palette of sight, scent, and sound to explore the fluidly interconnected states of being: memory, emotion, sleep, thought, and sensation, among others. Disclosing an acceptance of the world as it is, never refusing or diminishing life's full and reaching reality, Ludvigson possesses a joyous maturity that dovetails with the youthful urgency to know and understand exhibited in her early poems.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807126209
• ISBN13: 9780807126202
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful introduction to a vastly underrated poet

If you haven't read any of Susan Ludvigson's earlier books of poetry, this would make a great introduction to a wizard of words whose work moves from the mundane to the universal. Whether writing of sex and marriage, light and flight, or the terrors of modern life, Ludvigson is supple, smart and sly.

reprint of Library Journal review

"The body is a boat gliding / down the river whose fragrance / spins us to the shady places / under apple trees / and into bedrooms" It is the subtle influences--fragrance, music, color, the sound of snow falling, and the gradations of shadow and light--that move us, body, mind, and soul, through Ludvigson's poetry and closer to ourselves: "More and more I see / how everything goes together / There is such grace in this reconciliation." These poems consider the usual fare, places and people, family, friends, and lovers, but are blessed with a kind of grace. For the author, grace is almost accidental,"--like geometry, / where right answers come through paths / we can never retrace," and the reader ends up, after daring leaps and odd connections, back where he or she began. This volume is a gift for those of us who have come to Ludvigson's poetry late, selecting work from six previous collections and throwing in 20 new pieces. Highly recommended.