The Descent: Poems

By Sophie Cabot Black

Book Overview

"Black's poems, in their measured grace, have a quiet intensity, animated by her passion for a clarity of understanding, in the art as in the life."-Stanley Kunitz

I have not handled the ordinary well
And wandered into much time spent
Taking on the unfaithful,

Blunder and flaw. --from "Heaven, Which Is"

Sophie Cabot Black's anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Misunderstanding of Nature, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent. The voices of these poems struggle through the hesitancies of doubt and loss to end at more than survival or witness; they achieve clarity by singing of the resiliencies of the known world, after paradise inevitably fails.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555974066
• ISBN13: 9781555974060
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Documents her unmistakable voice and literary talent

Sophie Cabot Black is an award-winning poet whose lyrical verse and revelatory images evoke and highlight doubt, loss, survival, and spiritual resilience. The Descent is her second published collection and continues to document her unmistakable voice and literary talent. Lost: I am still here between the sun/That rises and the one that sets. To remain/Or go on. Which means to talk,//To remember wind, words for what happened,/How I could no longer figure you/From trees. And a turning of weather so quiet//I grew ashamed. I should have stayed with the horse/Huddled under ledge, but to go back now/Means to come upon myself. To be lost//Is to keep arriving. And so a trail becomes/All trails, perhaps a way out. Which is to say already/I am moving toward voices, each bend of the road//Made worse by knowing what I tell them/Will be different than what I've told myself.