Canopy: Poems

A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from “a contemporary master”*—a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment *Los Angeles Review of Books\nLinda Gregerson’s long-awaited new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, “in a world where every breath I take is luck.”\nFrom the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost, the poems ask: How does consciousness relate to the individual body, the individual to the communal, the community to our environment? How do we mourn a loved one, and how do we mourn strangers?\nThe magnificent poems in Canopy catalogue and reckon with humanity and the natural world, mortality, rage, love, grief, and survival.

Arts & Photography

Gregerson, Linda

Religious

Ecco

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

Mark Strand called these poems "among the very best being written." Bravely exploring the ways in which we encounter mortality, they emphasize the resourcefulness of the human spirit, the intelligence of the body, the abundant beauty of the created world. Devotional, even celebratory in their cadence, they move with the gravity of high art.

The Woman Who Died In Her Sleep

Self-Help

Relationships

This is the second book of poems by a powerful, compassionate, and fiercely intelligent poet who writes about the boundaries between life and death, sickness and health, body and spirit. Gregerson's theme is our formidable encounter with mortality - the assaults of disease and bodily harm, the gradations of material and psychic well-being, domestic treachery, self-slaughter, failures of mind. Her emphasis is always on the resourcefulness of the human spirit, the intelligence of the body, the abundant loveliness of the created world. What readers will love about these poems - many of them centered on young children - is their combination of straightforwardness and complexity. Linda Gregerson is not an ordinary believer, but the rhythms and icons of faith pervade her work. Readers will also relish the music of Gregerson's poems and the remarkable use of line breaks and patterns on the page, which give her poems aesthetic as well as moral authority. These are not light verses, far from it

Poetry

Houghton/Mifflin

In a wide-ranging and fiercely intelligent series of readings, Linda Gregerson presents an eloquent overview of the contemporary American lyric. This lyric is distinguished, she argues, not only by its unprecedented variety and abundance, but by its persistent and supple engagement with form. In detailed examinations of work by John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louis Glück, James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, C. K. Williams, Rita Dove, Philip Levine, Heather McHugh, William Meredith, John Hollander, and a host of other recent and contemporary poets, Gregerson documents the depth and richness of American lyric production at the turn of the twenty-first century. In its scruples and reservations as in its discriminating explanations, Negative Capability unearths the contours of a distinctive American poetic tradition. This book is a rich symbiosis of critical and poetic intelligence. It is also a work of passionate advocacy. The book will appeal to those interested in the current state of American poetry: practicing poets, readers and students of literature and literary criticism, professional critics. Linda Gregerson is an acclaimed poet and literary critic. She is author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic and two poetry collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep and Fire in the Conservatory. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she heads the Visiting Writers Program.

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (Poets On Poetry)

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

In a wide-ranging and fiercely intelligent series of readings, Linda Gregerson presents an eloquent overview of the contemporary American lyric. This lyric is distinguished, she argues, not only by its unprecedented variety and abundance, but by its persistent and supple engagement with form. In detailed examinations of work by John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louis Glück, James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, C. K. Williams, Rita Dove, Philip Levine, Heather McHugh, William Meredith, John Hollander, and a host of other recent and contemporary poets, Gregerson documents the depth and richness of American lyric production at the turn of the twenty-first century.In its scruples and reservations as in its discriminating explanations, Negative Capability unearths the contours of a distinctive American poetic tradition. This book is a rich symbiosis of critical and poetic intelligence. It is also a work of passionate advocacy.The book will appeal to those interested in the current state of American poetry: practicing poets, readers and students of literature and literary criticism, professional critics.Linda Gregerson is an acclaimed poet and literary critic. She is author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic and two poetry collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep and Fire in the Conservatory. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she heads the Visiting Writers Program.

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.

The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Series Number 6)

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.

In her first book of collected work, prize-winning poet Linda Gregerson mines nearly forty years of poetry, bringing us a full range of her talents. Ten new poems introduce Prodigal, followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadly in subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson’s standing as “one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality” (Chicago Tribune). A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet's intellect in the midst of her career.

PRODIGAL PA

EccoHMH

The New Yorker has written, “Gregerson’s rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically.” In this new volume, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from our profound embeddedness in physical reality. From subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and a breakthrough discovery in cell biology, Gregerson seeks to distill "the shape of the question," the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. "Choose any angle you like," she writes, "The world is split in two." One poem, "Bicameral," moves from a child's cleft palate to a gunshot wound to the hanging skeins of a fabric in a postwar art exhibit. In the wool cut from the sheep to make the materials of art, she finds a tangled record of violence and repair: "The body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe." Longtime readers of Gregerson's poetry will be facinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful poets.

Magnetic North

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

Books by Gregerson, Linda

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

Canopy: Poems

Canopy: Poems

The Woman Who Died In Her Sleep

The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (Poets On Poetry)

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (Poets On Poetry)

The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Series Number 6)

The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Series Number 6)

PRODIGAL PA

Magnetic North