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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9781932511369
ISBN: 1932511369
Label: Sarabande Books
Manufacturer: Sarabande Books
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 88
Publication Date: 2006-05-01
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Studio: Sarabande Books

These are poems for grownups who believe in life and death. They are chastened by the press of the second part of life, and reading these poems is like walking through a museum of priceless artifacts-at night, alone, in silence-our heels echoing down marble corridors. Gradually we come to see that even these language exhibits, these brilliantly made dioramas, are fading. We know it. The poet knows it. But the fact that she has made them anyway, against that knowledge, means everything.

Aleda Shirley is the author of two collections of poems, Chinese Architecture and Long Distance. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A grim yet powerful collection
Review: Dark Familiar is an anthology of impressively crafted free-verse poetry about the transition between life and death, and the unknowable hereafter. Poignant, meant to be read in silence and soberly contemplated, Dark Familiar is Aleda Shirley's first collection in nearly ten years, and contains the emotion and the harsh perspective that concrete awareness of entropy brings to one's personal daily life. A grim yet powerful collection. The Asphodel Fields: In its liquid form water's incompressible / & yet a river moves not only through space / but through time. When I lived by the river // it rose ten feet in a single night - there / were petals on the surface, carnelian flecks / from a Judas tree. A boy waved from a ledge // of blue light, but i must have been the bridge, / or a barge lifted to eye-level by the flood. / Where is he now. And you, where are you.

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