With Little Savage, Emily Fragos delivers a magnificent collection in the American tradition of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. With clean, strongly wrought lines she builds poems that are elegant and powerful. Marie Ponsot calls the collection remarkable. What separates Fragos from her contemporaries is her amazing ability to empathize with the characters she createsthe misfits, the artists, the children kept in a fifteenth century school, the composer going mad. She convincingly becomes a young girl in the Venetian conservatory for the abandoned: Sofia del violino. Once I saw myself / in a clear puddle of rain / water. My teeth are very crooked, I / know. We are none of us / startled by the other. We are all / the same. To Heaven.” These moments ache with honesty, humility, and make us wish that every sentiment expressed by Fragos could be true. Deceptively simple poems written by an unostentatiously skilled poet, Little Savage is permeated with a reverence for nature, music, myth and dancea veritable treasure trove of compassion and grace. Richard Howard's Foreword You are alone in the room, reading her poems. Nothing is happening, nothing wrong, but all at once, say around page 17 or 18, you hear remember, no one is with you, no one else is therea sigh. Or a whispered word: someone. You are not alarmed, but you had thought you were alone. Perhaps not. The sensation is what Freud used to call unheimlich, uncanny. That is the effect of the poems of Emily Fragos. Like their maker, her readers are accompanied, and not to their ulterior knowledge. It is not disagreeable to be thus escorted, attended, joined, but we had not expected it. And as Robert Frost used to tell us (no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader”), Fragos too has not expected such visitations, as she will call them. This poetthese poemsendure otherness, they are haunted: I remain, with one of everything.” Even as one is being savedconjure the army of others” What would happen to my life when all along there has been nothing but me?” Did you not see how I was made to feel when you put me among others” And my bodyuninhabitedsuffers and wonders: whose hands are these? whose hair?” The poems will reveal whose, though I do not think Emily Fragos herself ever finds out. Inevitably, we recall that old surrealist shibboleth, Tell me by what you are haunted and I will tell you who you are;” it can be the password to indentity. But this poet has what she calls luxurious mind” and her ghosts are legion: Alone in my odd-shaped room, I practice Blindness and the world floats close and away. I am uncertain of everything. I must walk slowly, carefully. She is acknowledging, with some uneasiness (will you please tidy up?”), that it is not only the beloved dead, the proximate departed who are with her, who possess her, but others, any others. The remarkable thing about this poetic consciousness is that the woman’s body is inhabitedsometimes with mere habitude, sometimes joyously, more often with astonishing painby the prolixity of the real (and of the unreal’); the poems are instinct with others: How dare you Care for me when all my life I have had this voltage to ignite me, this rhythm to drive me, when something inside your body dares me to touch my hands to yours And quite as remarkable, of course, is the even tonality of such possession; there is nothing hysterical or even driven about the voice of the poems as it records, as it laments or exults in these unsought attendants. There is merelymerely!a loving consistency of heedfulness; and one remembers Blake’s beautiful aphorism: unmixed attention is prayer. Of course such poetic staffage is not peculiar to Emily Fragos; like Maeterlinck, like Rilke, she exults in her discovered awareness: I need the other/the way a virus/needs a host.” Rather, she imbues, she infects all of us with the consciousness that there are no single souls: we are not alone.

Little Savage (Grove Press Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Fragos, Emily

Poetry

GROVE PRESS

Music's Spell

Biographies & Memoirs

Everyman

Fragos's poetry is hostage to nothing but her unique voice

Hostage: New & Selected Poems

Sheep Meadow Press

"Emily Fragos's poems are mysterious. Her songs make me confess to myself. In her poems, you find the God's honest truth like wildflowers. Her poems are ferocious and saintly (you must remember, one saint, Saint Julian, murdered his mother and father, not a problem with Emily). She is somehow self-born, which is my way of saying her poems are unique, singular, necessary--wonder-full poems, very good dogs." --Stanley Moss "Emily Fragos is a thin-skinned, tough-minded poet of this world. Her sensual sensibility is unrestrained by conventional perceptual grids. Her poems take us by surprise. . . . Fragos's trust in language is fruitful, justified. No word she writes is an advertisement for herself. We are enlarged by her resonant verbal imagination." --Marie Ponsot

Saint Torch

Unrest: 23 New and 45 Present Past Poems

USYRC

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Books by Fragos, Emily