Poems consider Amelia Earhart, tea, photography, fiction, nature, love, spring, death, music, and myth

Navigable Waterways (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Alexander, Pamela

Poetry

Yale University Press

Poems consider Amelia Earhart, tea, photography, fiction, nature, love, spring, death, music, and myth

Navigable Waterways (Yale Series of Younger Poets No 20)

Yale Univ Pr

Combining the best of poetry, nature writing, a biography, Pamela Alexander in her book-length “persona poem” brings to life John James Audubon and a world not yet aware of nature’s limits. She distills the essence of this remarkable naturalistic-artist and gives him voice to tell his life story in fragments and letters, journal entries, actual vignettes, and lyrical passages. Captivating, and accessible, her poem reads with the authority of autobiography, the dramatic coherence of a novel, and the evocative clarity of an Audubon print. The reader, briefly transported to the natural world of America a century and a half ago, cannot help but contrast its condition today and feel a poignant sense of loss.

Commonwealth of Wings: An Ornithological Biography Based on the Life of John James Audubon (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

A combination of poetry, nature writing, and biography in one book-length persona-poem.Combining the best of poetry, nature writing, and biography, Pamela Alexander in her book-length persona-poem brings to life John James Audubon and a world not yet aware of nature's limits. She distills the essence of this remarkable naturalist-artist and gives him voice to tell his life's story in fragments of letters, journal entries, actual vignettes and lyrical passages, Captivating and accessible, her poem reads with the authority of autobiography, the dramatic coherence of a novel, and the evocative clarity of an Audubon print. The reader, briefly transported to the natural world of America a century and a half ago, cannot help but contrast its condition today and feel a poignant sense of loss.

Pamela Alexander's poetry is characterized by inventive language, scrupulous accuracy of imagery, and a winning fusion of the comic and the deeply serious. Her subjects vary as widely as her settings, which range from the New Hampshire woods to the Arizona desert. A family life eccentric to the point of chaos, close observations of wildlife, and coastal sailing are among the poet's topics. Despite this variety, Inland has an emerging organization that suggests a kind of plot. The family is left behind in the way that families of origin always are, revealed fully only in perspective: “foghorns / in the harbor, two different pitches / at different intervals / repeating so often I didn't hear them / and their accidental harmonies / until I'd left town.” Shifting toward the subject of new relationships, in her diatribe against a past (and passing) lover Alexander gives a new twist to the fact that this subject has been fair game for poets for centuries: “...you could say hello, you canoe-footed fur-faced / musk ox, pockets full of cheese and acorns / and live fish and four-headed winds and sky...” James Merrill, praising Alexander's first book, called it “a wonderful achievement. Her language is now simple, now playful, now extremely poignant.” This is an apt description of Inland as well, a book that shows Alexander in witty yet serious engagement with the world. The longest poem here, “Swallowing the Anchor” (the title is the sailors' term for giving up the sea), is also the most directly personal. It closes the section of the book in which the poet comes to terms with losses, including the death of the loved one. She does this with grace—and her wit is not jokes, her poignancy is not sentimentality.

Inland (Iowa Poetry Prize)

University Of Iowa Press

In the nineties, a large church in Hixson Tennessee called Central Baptist Church began undergoing a tremendous transformation, engineered by the pastor, Dr. Ron Phillips. He claimed that while away on a trip, God gave him an experience in a hotel room, and by that claim, Dr. Phillips began to turn our traditional Baptist church into a Word of Faith congregation, or as I learned later, a New Apostolic Reformation church, though few had heard of that movement back then because it was only just arriving as a new "theology", a "new" gospel. Ron Phillips drove out the trustees and took over all monies, and he began a campaign of severe domination over the faith of everyone in the church. He began calling himself Thee Prophet in keeping with the secretive NAR network, and he said that God did not speak through anyone at Central Baptist anymore but him. While hundreds of people poured out of the church, many families were deliberately driven out by Ron Phillips and his associates. He ruled everyone with an iron fist, and he used fear tactics to keep people in line, and if anyone disagreed with his new theology, he threatened them with expulsion and called them "out of line." He and his associates used slander and lies and bullying and persecution and character assassination to manipulate the congregation; and those who could not be bullied, Ron Phillips found ways to maliciously and deviously kick them out of the church. I'm one of those people, and this is my true story, and this is my warning to anyone who follows the false doctrine of the Word of Faith teachers and especially the NAR. It is my opinion that Central Baptist was converted into a New Apostolic Reformation cult called: Abba's House. And, in Revelations 2: 2-3, Jesus said, "I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardship for my name, and have not grown weary." The Lord praises those few who recognize false prophets and false apostles, and he stands with those who stop tolerating them. So in Jesus, though I am derided and slandered in the reviews below by certain people who don't know what they're talking about but only want to air their own opinion, I am confident in the Lord Jesus and his approval of my honest testimony, since it was Jesus who told me to write this book and publish it, and I obeyed. May Jesus be glorified above all. Note: I write this portion in August 2017, and to date, no one from Central Baptist Church/Abbas's House has obeyed Matthew 5:23-25: "Therefore if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift." To date: I have not been contacted, and more, if I had lied or written libel against Ron Phillips and those with him, the statute of limitation for suing me for libel came and went, and no suit came forth. They knew I was telling the truth. They abused me and others, and they've been holed-up hiding it ever since.

Abba's House, Dr. Ron Phillips, and The Silence of the Spirit

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Studies

Glass Page Books

The poems in Slow Fire use original and compelling language to create experiences so real that the reader can inhabit them. This poet can delight in a “loitering” saxophone or a twelfth-century stone prayer hut, but much of her attention—her “eye” of close observation and precise language—is tuned to the natural world.
With a lifelong interest in ecology and outdoor experience from Maine to Arizona, Pamela Alexander incorporates specifics of desert and forest into her lines. Whatever the subject of the poem, from the death of a mother to marriage to real estate (James Merrill called her choice of subjects “impeccably democratic”), this is a book with an environmental consciousness and a liveliness of language that engages the reader on many levels.
 Pamela Alexander is the author of three previous collections. Her first, Navigable Waterways, a Yale Younger Poets selection, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. After teaching for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where she is co-editor of FIELD magazine. An avid outdoorswoman, Alexander often finds the beginnings of poems as she bikes, hikes, kayaks, and cross-country skis. She divides her time between Ohio and Ontario, Canada.

Slow Fire

Ausable Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alexander, Pamela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alexander, Pamela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alexander, Pamela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Navigable Waterways (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Navigable Waterways (Yale Series of Younger Poets No 20)

Commonwealth of Wings: An Ornithological Biography Based on the Life of John James Audubon (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Commonwealth of Wings: An Ornithological Biography Based on the Life of John James Audubon (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Inland (Iowa Poetry Prize)

Abba's House, Dr. Ron Phillips, and The Silence of the Spirit

Slow Fire