A small band of guerrillas plans to take over a jungle-ridden Bolivian backcountry province, a German industrialist eyes all of South America, and the American president has his own takeover plans

In the Wink of an Eye

Literature & Fiction

CHERRY, Kelly

Humor & Satire

Harcourt

Life is A Kind of Dream. So is the art we make in response to life. In A Kind of Dream, five generations of an artistic family explore the ups and downs of life, discovering that for an artist even failure is success, because the work matters more than the self. The selves in this book include Nina, a writer, and her husband, Palmer, a historian, who, having settled into marriage and family life, are now faced with the bittersweetness of late life; BB and Roy, who make a movie in Mongolia; Tavy, Nina’s adopted daughter, a painter in her twenties who meets her birth mother for the first time; and Tavy’s young daughter, Callie, a budding violinist. Other vivid characters confront the awful fact of violence in America; try to cope with political ineptitude; and one devises his own code of sexual morality. Perhaps the most important character is Nina's dog, a salt-and-pepper cairn terrier of uncommon wisdom. Fame, death, rash self-destruction, laughter, the excitement of making good art, love, marriage, being a mother, being a father, the appreciation of beauty, and always life—life itself, life in all its shapes and guises—it’s all here. A Kind of Dream is the culminating book in a trilogy Kelly Cherry began with My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers and The Society of Friends. Each book stands alone, but together they take us on a Dantean journey from midlife to Paradise. Cherry’s prose is hallmarked by lyric grace, sly wit, the energy of her intelligence, and profound compassion for and understanding of her characters. Set in Madison, Wisconsin, A Kind of Dream reveals a surprisingly wide view of the world and the authority of someone who has mastered her art. It is a book to experience and to reflect upon. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

A Kind of Dream: Stories

United States

University of Wisconsin Press

Augusta, is an elegant young flutist preparing for her debut at Town Hall. In this splendid comedy, she is joined by a cast of wonderfully absurd characters--her husband, his father, her ex-lover, a nightclub stripper, a peeping Tom, and a canary. Within the scope of these characters, the author reflects on love, marriage, family, art, and captures the way men and women relate--or fail to relate--to one another.

Augusta Played

Houghton/Mifflin

Relativity: A Point of View : Poems

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Her third book and second volume of poetry.

Relativity: A Point of View

Louisiana State University Press

Natural Theology: Poems

Natural Theology

In January, 1965, in the café of the Hotel Metropol, in Moscow, the young American poet Kelly Cherry met the young Latvian composer Imant Kalnin. They fell in love―and began an alliance of the heart and mind sustained over twenty-five years in the face of threats from the Central Committee, surveillance by the KGB, confiscation of mail by censors, and eve “disinformation.” Their passionate friendship, growing out of a recognition of each other’s artistic destiny, also survived the hazards of other relationships―romantic and familial―and the professional demands of two careers, and sheer distance. There was more at stake here than just love. Or maybe just love is exactly what this romance was about: the deeply felt attempt to learn whether and why and how to love justly. What can love mean, when the world in which it is expressed and experienced is corrupt?
In The Exiled Heart, Kelly Cherry takes on that profound question, seeking answers to it at every level―theological, political, artistic, personal. In this book that is in the great tradition of Dostoevsky and Anna Akhmatova and at the same time startlingly original and American, she translates experience into a work of classic dimensions. Interpreting in extraordinary prose her firsthand encounters with Latvia and Latvians, describing a weekend at an underground hotel in Leningrad, or recounting misadventures with the Soviet consulate in London (the same cast kept changing characters), she pursues a philosophical quest. The Exiled Heart is a nonfiction narrative journey that, of necessity, makes metaphorical excursions into philosophical territory as Cherry reflects on the nature of justice, the idea of utopia, morality in art, the meaning of despair, the problem of suffering, the possibility of forgiveness. As the author explains in the first chapter, “I didn’t know, in 1965, where that train was taking me: to Moscow, I thought, but equally to my heart and my conscience. This book is a kind of log, a moral travelogue if you will, of a course that was set then and there, deep into heartland.”
These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written side trips broaden an autobiographical story into a tale of political exile and personal covenant that is almost a paradigm for the history of the Cold War and for the faith in the future that has always led people and nations to strive for independence. Beginning with a girl and a boy in a Moscow café, in the end this stunning book is about nothing less that the soul’s search for freedom.

The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography

LSU Press

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams―the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake―it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs.In the poems of God’s Loud Hand, Cherry conducts―often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry (“Lord save me,” “Lord forgive me,” “Lord help me”)―a metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr, perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a willingness to ask Abraham’s great question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge wisely?”This intellectual boldness reveals itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points logically―no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks―an exaltation of larks, as they say―that rise each morning to heaven’s gate, but instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy’s own music.And in what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods. From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama, through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the orchestral outburst of the final group of poems―poetry celebrating its own freedom ot be poetry―in all these parts (“a chorus of lyrics,” one might say) there is a symphonic unity that astonishes, an ode to joy.

God's Loud Hand: Poems

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams―the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake―it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs.
 In the poems of God’s Loud Hand, Cherry conducts―often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry (“Lord save me,” “Lord forgive me,” “Lord help me”)―a metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr, perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a willingness to ask Abraham’s great question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge wisely?”
 This intellectual boldness reveals itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points logically―no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks―an exaltation of larks, as they say―that rise each morning to heaven’s gate, but instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy’s own music.
 And in what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods. From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama, through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the orchestral outburst of the final group of poems―poetry celebrating its own freedom ot be poetry―in all these parts (“a chorus of lyrics,” one might say) there is a symphonic unity that astonishes, an ode to joy.

God's Loud Hand: Poems (Southern Literary Studies)

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