Description
Book SynopsisCyclorama is a book of poems named after the theatre-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular after the American Civil War. It features the voices of people often overlooked in representations of the war, such as nurse, child, draftee, prostitute, enslaved person, Native American soldier, and woman soldier.
Trade Review"This long poem, pitched in so many American voices, is a powerful summoning-back ... Cyclorama keeps our dead with us, alongside the living souls we carry in our unfinished civil war. Daneen Wardrop is a rare poet of conscience." -- -Jean Valentine "Daneen Wardrop has done deep research in the life and times and art of the U.S. Civil War and transformed it into exuberant and moving poetry. She speaks as women spies, soldiers and officers, kids exploring the ruins of Jefferson's Monticello, a prostitute who keeps a flask tucked in her crinoline, Union musicians who find themselves playing 'Lorena' with Reb musicians, and so much more. Wardrop's music makes you proud of the American language. Cyclorama is one of the most stunning books of poems I've seen in years. I can't wait to see what Wardrop will do next." -- -Alicia Ostriker "Daneen Wardrop gives us her own Cyclorama not as answer but as stunningly sympathetic example. Whereas a person following a perspective to the horizon might, in the painted cyclorama, run into the canvas on which it's painted, a reader enters into the pages of these poems and finds that the words give way to some intimacy that history should preclude. But the poet knows different. Tracing in their own voices-mimicry that is here a form of valor and virtue-Wardrop gives image back to all those wounded and wounding. Such traces tend to be lost, just a thread in an archive. Wardrop takes such threads and in her hand finds a selvage that-pulled on gently-reveals the whole garment: those interwoven lives whose voices exist without our knowing inside our own speaking. Cyclorama gives us this primary poetic gift: that we enter it, and what it shows in its pages, not only makes history real to us, but in doing so, makes us more real to ourselves." -- -Dan Beachy-Quick "Prepare yourself, as you read Cyclorama, to hear voices that will stay in your head long after you've put the book down, voices that seem to rise up from the depths of history. It's the women speakers here who haunt me the most as they record the horrifying loss of life and limb that circles these women like a cyclorama and at times engulfs them. Line by memorable line, Daneen Wardrop revives and adapts the form of the dramatic lyric to move from striking descriptions-of Civil War battles and wounds, places, and events-to unforgettable moments of quiet revelation." -- -Ed Folsom The University of Iowa "When Wardrop touches her own psychological nerve she touches the reader's nerve. Now see the finely-developed craft: the cadence of storm-clenched days, the diction of tumult and solitude, and a lyricism that holds all ... Daneen Wardrop places the reader square in the center of her panoramic panels and bids us experience the scenes 360 . What a glorious way to enter these histories." -- -Kimiko Hahn from the foreword
