My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

The winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Talvikki Ansel for My Shining Archipelago. "Ansel`s poetry is refreshingly original," says the distinguished poet and contest judge James Dickey. "She renders the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed, the lurking, the waiting to happen. This is true imagination, true craft." Flemish Beauty Yesterday, all winter, I had not thought of pears, considered: pear. The tear-shaped, papery core, precise seeds. This one channeled through with worm tunnels. Bruises, a rotten half― sometimes there’s nothing left to drop into the pot. That phrase I could have said: “you still have us…” The knife slides easily beneath the skins, top to base, spiraling them away. The insubstantial us. It could as well be the pear talking to the river, turning to the grass (“you still have us”). Besides, it’s just me a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full of peels)―and sometimes, yes, that seems enough: a pear― this larger one, yellow-green, turning to red: “Duchess” maybe, “Devoe,” or what I want to call it: “Flemish Beauty.” When I can’t sleep, I’ll hold my hand as if I held a pear, my fingers mimicking the curve. The same curve as the newel post I’ve used for years, swinging myself up to the landing, always throwing my weight back. And always nails loosening, mid-bound.

Literature & Fiction

Ansel, Talvikki

Poetry

Yale University Press

The poems in Talvikki Ansel’s Somewhere in Space work to locate us in this world and its mix of the made and natural, the cultivated and untamable. Faced with such mysteries and intricacies as the water-conducting tissue of trees, the sensory abilities of vultures, the lives of past writers (Edith Södergran, Bruno Schulz), and fragments of history and our tenuous connections to them, the poems acknowledge the difficulty of authority, yet continue with their forays. Invented characters coexist with observations of mergansers and moths, orioles and cats; “Particulars rock / just inside the breakwater / like conjured up skiffs.”

Somewhere in Space (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

Ohio State University Press

Praise for Ansel's My Shining Archipelago:

Jetty and Other Poems

William Ralph Pr

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Books by Ansel, Talvikki

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

My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Somewhere in Space (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

Jetty and Other Poems