From movie making to medical misadventures, meditations on widowhood to feminist protestations, Expectation Days is a dazzling portrayal of instances in Sandra McPherson’s life. Her autobiographical collection uses peculiar and exact language to reflect on a wide range of activities that include grouse hunting, going through airport security after 9/11, and climbing a coastal cliff. From being an unintended child to ceremonializing a lifetime “served,” McPherson speaks in both clear and distressing voices from the state of speechless fear that is bereavement.     Will the little figures ever reach the monument?A doctor orders me to be on watch.     Will the mist pass over their cheeks     and clear the strollers’ eyes?If so, I’ll see it. I’m on watch.I train my eyes on paintingsto see if there is any change.--from “On Suicide Watch”

Expectation Days (Illinois Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

McPherson, Sandra

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

"I count Sandra McPherson as one of the dozen or so truly outstanding American poets who write brilliantly in the Romantic tradition. . . . The God of Indeterminacy brings together a group of exciting poems showing the vital influence of her interest in the blues tradition and in African-American quiltmaking. They are brilliant testimonials to this fruitful wedding of the musical, the visual, and the literary." -- Clarance Major

The God of Indeterminacy: POEMS (National Poetry)

Her first book of poems and winner of the Association Of American Universities Presses' Award for the National Council on the Arts Selection in poetry.

Elegies for the Hot Season

Indiana University Press

Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Poems inspired by the work of folk artists are combined with nature poems featuring the Northwest coast

Wesleyan University Press

Edge Effect is Sandra McPherson's most original work to date. Constructed in two parts, the collection embraces secretly related worlds: the poetics of natural history and artistic discoveries of self-taught folk artists. Throughout, waves from one poem mark the shores of others. In natural history, an edge effect occurs where two communities, such as land and sea, overlap, that zone becoming more diversified than each of them. McPherson explores this effect in nature and art, questioning our notions of inside and outside, center and margin. Profound and moving, she recasts the very premises of formal understanding in poetry, accommodating at once the arts of nature and the nature of art.

The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967–1995 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

In 1967, Sandra McPherson's daughter Phoebe was born with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. In The Spaces Between Birds, McPherson collects poems from six of her published books as well as new poems, uncollected poems, and poems written under a pseudonym, that draw on her experiences as a mother to Phoebe. Representing 28 years of work, these poems describe the voyage-both wrenching and exhilarating-on which mother and daughter embarked. Interspersed are poems by Phoebe, offering an illuminating and often searing counterpoint to those of her mother. The poems poignantly evoke the world created by autism, providing a rare sense of an inner life that has long been unapprehendable, and detailing the intimacy and ultimate alienness of relations even between mother and daughter, and even between word and meaning. SANDRA MCPHERSON is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Edge Effect (Wesleyan, 1966) and The God of Indeterminacy (Illinois, 1993). Her book The Year of Birth (Ecco, 1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and she has been featured on the Bill Moyers series The Language of Life. She is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. "With an elegant directness reminiscent of Anne Sexton's, Spaces is a flock of hard truths, joyfully told . . . McPherson is a distinctive stylist and a compassionate voice whose work continues to enrich and reward readers."-Publishers Weekly

A Visit to Civilization (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

A meditation on brokenness and wholeness, history and forgetting.

This extraordinary poetic voyage uses explorations of the material culture of our past and present as points of departure. Sandra McPherson succeeds in drawing us into her examination of objects from the 20th and late 19th centuries through her weaving together of images both familiar and startling into deeply satisfying poems. She is especially interested in articles that might seem useless, extinct, or "irrelevant" to us now, such as children's military playthings, diaries and scrapbooks of unknown and unfamous people, quilts from people of Mennonite and Amish convictions, "primitive" utilitarian wooden objects, telegrams and curious photographs. These poems are characteristically simple and unadorned, bringing readers closer and closer to a physical world we often overlook, but which is filled with sensation and meaning. From traditional stanzaic poems to collages and prose ghazals, the author embraces "civilization" by visiting the spirit of the secret voices of its people.

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

Books by McPherson, Sandra

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

Expectation Days (Illinois Poetry Series)

The God of Indeterminacy: POEMS (National Poetry)

Expectation Days (Illinois Poetry Series)

Elegies for the Hot Season

Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967–1995 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967–1995 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

A Visit to Civilization (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

A Visit to Civilization (Wesleyan Poetry Series)