The Flute Ship "Castricum"

By Amy England

Book Overview

In these richly-imagined poems, Amy England quite literally recreates the art form, showing us in poem after poem new ways to dazzle. Yet she makes us, somehow, perfectly comfortable, right at home. Endlessly smart, sensuous, funny, these poems make us gasp with recognition and pleasure. They won't sit still: they perform for us.

"Babelujah" exults the poet, creating one of her worlds within words within worlds, where sound shapes sense, and sense is the future overtaking us, right now, zipping up fast out of nowhere. Amy England's verse is full-bore polyphonic, textured, touchable, wrenching, celebratory. These bravados thrill with their gymnastic tumbling, their defiance of gravity--the law, and honoring of gravity--the mode. They are, these jewels, new-world brilliant, hauntingly inventive, ultimately transporting.

What falls from the sky? What, exactly, is it crows say when they gather together? Should you trust a snake with a monocle? What does the poet see in her sleep? Read on. On The Flute Ship Castricum, the muse is a library is a man in a white shirt, the mud tablets of the law are still wet (there's time ), but hurry, the tourists are out in force. In these richly-imagined poems, Amy England quite literally recreates the art form, showing us in poem after poem new ways to dazzle. Yet she makes us, somehow, perfectly comfortable, right at home. Endlessly smart, sensuous, funny, these poems make us gasp with recognition and pleasure. They won't sit still: they perform for us.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971031037
• ISBN13: 9780971031036
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 0.3" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

a unique and capacious voice in American poetry

Amy England is one of the most uniquely talented poets writing today. Her work crosses boundaries of verse and prose, of myth, history and personal experience, of fact and imagination, and of places, nations, and cultures, to create a synthesis that both lovingly contains and transcends its individual elements. Her poems wonderfully evoke Chicago and Japan as places and as states of mind (one section of the book is entitled "Chicago As Gallery of Icons"), but even moreso, they enact the travels of the mind through place and time, including its journeys through mind itself as a place where all the places come together.The long poem "Endnotes," counterpointing Japanese creation myths, a Dutch physician's experience in 17th century Japan, and the musings of a 20th century American expatriate in a dazzling verbal and conceptual fugue, is a stunning accomplishment. Such larger compositions are in turn counterpointed with short poems encapsulating moments of pure lyric beauty, often based on close observation, seeing things but seeing through them, as in this quote from "For Ralph Mills": "White aspens are grey at trunk, like wainscoting on a plaster wall, and deer walk through the room it makes, not here though. The soft yard. When he was a boy his father said Watch. Struck match, quick edge of fire and the white was gone."The Flute Ship 'Castricum' deserves a wide and admiring audience.