Poetry. San Francisco poet Susan Thackrey's debut book of poetry, EMPTY GATE -- a long-awaited superb first book (Norma Cole) collects six sequences of poems in a work of singular endeavor, attention, and lyric intelligence. Ms.Thackrey, a member of the inaugaural class in poetics at New College of California when that program was created around the occasion of Robert Duncan's teaching, now works in San Francisco as a practicing analyst. EMPTY GATE is dedicated to Duncan, and opens with an epigraph from William of Aquitaine's Proven++al canzon: Farai un vers de dreyt nien (I'll make a verse of pure nothing) Out of negatives then, such silences (so what is it that holds its shape / shot full of holes maintains its hold / informs on us in time) the question becomes how to find a way, unfounded just here. EMPTY GATE joins Norma Cole's MARS and Duncan McNaughton's VALPARAISO as the third book in the Listening Chamber Poetry Series.

Empty Gate

Literature & Fiction

Thackrey, Susan

Poetry

Listening Chamber

Poetry. Translation. The book is a collection of Arabic-Andalusian poems; intimate moments which the author encountered in a group of early writings from the Andalusian area of Spain, and to which she eloquently responds. Her original poems appear, as well as the poems in Arabic, and translations in Spanish and English. "Federico Garcia Lorca's last book, published posthumously, Diván del Tamarit, was inspired by Spanish translations from the medieval Arabic poets of Al- Andalus. The same passionate inspiration evokes these new poems by Susan Thackrey, only this time they come transformed, constructed and reconstructed. There are the poems from the Arabic; then the Spanish translations by scholar and literary critic Emilio Gomez Garcia; then Thackrey's devastatingly concise translations from Spanish to English; and, lastly and also firstly, her poems in response to the Andalusian work. Here are traces upon violent traces of memory, heart's openness, the apparition of the beloved, visions of nostalgia in the east wind—in short, the vernacular love lyric in multiple languages and eras."—Norma Cole

Andalusia

Chax Press

Fantastic New Work by visionary poet Susan Thackrey / seeing through the waters. 
Evoking Homer, the sea, and our particularity as humans who face choices, with and against orders, Susan Thackrey, a poet in the line of Robert Duncan and the literary and psychological classics, writes a compelling whole book which keeps us in its wave (and waves) as it seeks "for some / common / rhyme" and finds more than one might imagine. Poetry of this sort compels us to look within, and to connect that inner vision to the world. Place Thackrey in the company of H.D., Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, and Sappho. This is a glorious book. 
"There is a father in FARTHER, and in epigraphs from Homer and Robert Duncan, who imagined the blind Homer hanging out in the women's house, and the rhythms of his poems coming from the sounds of their weaving. Ordo is the order of the threads. Thackrey here weaves a way through/under complex orders, calling us to order and disorder and finally to immanence. This is a lore poet in her prime."--David Levi Strauss 
"Without reference of horizon farther makes navigation by usual instruments, and heroes, impossible. We recognize the image on its cover as sea; we recognize its language as English. Recognition ends there. We are in a funnel descent--a downward circular motion that washes section titles from one another until only the letter O remains. Words also turn into and fall from each other: always compass / encompassing passing / collapsing / as if beauty were complete / not. We fall into the sea of Thackrey's sleight of ear--a straight line of words becomes a spiral, a whole book a circling back. We enter the letter O--lens opening, contraction--the slip space between letters, words, lines, the said, the implied echo. This is how she turns us through the open portal of order's disorder, a history that begins with sundering and ends with shattering--This is how she collapses the compass so that known coordinates disappear, making possible this paean to as if beauty that is infinitely farther."--Susan Gevirtz 
"There's an enchantment to these poemsm . . . you remind us that we're still humans, very very much so . . . the poems are refreshingly 'contemporary' - in the way, I guess, 'reality' is always so. I mean things profoundly felt are always young. "--Etel Adnan (personal letter re: Andalusia) 
Poetry. Art. Women's Studies.

Farther

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Books by Thackrey, Susan

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

Empty Gate

Andalusia

Farther