We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,581,373.67 | Books Available: 793,737 | Members Online: 220

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing

Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing
Author: Kate Farrell

Kate Farrell's lucid and engaging collection treats us to a trek through "the cosmos behind the forehead." Farrell's metaphysical quest begins in earnest with a childhood plan to run away with her sister to an elusive blue forest, moves on to an island where bodies are optional, an afterlife reading where T. S. Eliot recites his revised Four Qua... more »rtets, and a project to "catch and train / the birds to catch and train us." The dream-like "academy" of the title poem could stand for the book itself, its curriculum of loss and longing, a lens for our own. In the wake of her young husband's suicide, Farrell wonders whether Keats' "truth of imagination" can tell her children "why life is worth living." These poems suggest it can. Indeed, the "yen to get at the otherworldly" yields a collection that amounts to a "unified theory of love, death and poetry," swapping "old / North stars for new" while remaining "faithful," in Dickinson's dictum, "to mystery." The poetry of Kate Farrell is astonishing, new and fresh. In many ways, Farrell has the excellent strangeness of Miró and Klee. Her dream poems become fabulously real, while everyday reality is replenished by a lushly eclectic metaphysics. Her humor is a perfect new perspective. I might add that this volume is one of the most complete presentations I have seen in years.

--David Shapiro, author of New and Selected Poems (1965?2006) What could be more thrilling than the change-your-life seriousness of the true poem? Maybe only the I-see-through-myself playfulness of the true poem? Kate Farrell's new book Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing dazzles with rigor and wild wit. The voice can be visceral, driven past tears to amazement: "Six years to the day after my husband's suicide, my mother / nailed the house windows shut and drove to a hillside in western / Oklahoma to watch a spaceship land." But this isn't bleak territory; there's an intuition of transcendence. Farrell's poems are ultimately visits to the interior terra incognita Rilke indicates in the phrase "we who don't know our feelings' shape, but only that which forms them from outside." Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing is an encounter, a journey, an illumination.

--D. Nurkse, author of A Night in Brooklyn With deceptively brilliant simplicity and friendliness, Kate Farrell strides directly into areas long declared off limits for serious poets, and sets up camp there. The poems she brings back are boldly philosophical yet unencumbered by any dogma save one: she is true to the sense of mystery at the heart of life and all things in it. To read her poetry is to witness that mystery brought to light with an ease, candor, and power that are rare in any time, but especially in ours.

--Ptolemy Tompkin, author of The Modern Book of the Dead Whether deployed in deft free verse or fluent prose poetry, Farrell's confiding style carries with equal ease references to Rilke or to multistory parking lots. She inhabits a recognizable contemporary world but often beholds it like the blind man who said, after his sight was restored by Jesus, "I see men as trees, walking." And with this notable debut collection, she initiates us poem by poem into what she calls "the enormity of consciousness."

--Philip Fried, author of Interrogating Water I can't think of another poet writing today who writes more beautifully and more deeply about beauty, about longing, about life, about probability and possibility even as our lives go on and go in the unpredictable and sometimes difficult ways they will, than Kate Farrell.

--Mark Statman, author of That Train Again and A Map of the Winds

ISBN-13: 9781935084914
ISBN-10: 1935084917
Publication Date: 1/1/2016
Pages: 116
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Lavender Ink
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Poetry >> Regional & Cultural >> United States

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing

Loading...