Description
Book SynopsisThe musically wrought and emotionally candid poems explore the pleasure and pain of family relationships, the complicated joy of being a woman, and the unconventional beauty of the Great Plains.
Trade Review“Hilda Raz has an appetite for the pleasures of touch, sight, love; an openness to the wounds of life and the ‘common face’ of death; a capacity for language that captures the weather and the details of a place and time, a day, the changes of a lifetime. The poetry of
What Happens mirrors ‘our great and perfect / need,’ along with myths, riddles, and ‘everything possible blooming.’”
“Hilda Raz’s poetic diction is always immediate and direct, engaging the reader. She achieves special intensity in her depiction of the human body, its vulnerability, and its capacity for pleasure (see ‘Friend in a Distant City’ and ‘Pain’). Here is a poet at the height of her formidable powers to move and inspire.”—Robert Pack, author of
Still Here, Still Now “Underneath ‘ordinary stars and a late moon,’ extraordinary things happen to the people in Hilda Raz’s poems. Love transforms, bodies transform, health transforms, and looked at freshly, the things we thought we knew burst into strangeness. There is nothing like Raz’s charged, smart, profound, moving poems, so rich in both intellect and heart, so open and wise, provoked by the question ‘how can we live properly?’”—Floyd Skloot, author of
The Wink of the Zenith “A moving, still fresh, collection of poetry.”—Linda Read Deeds,
Nebraska Life“These are emotionally taut poems, created by the poet to share herself or, perhaps, her many selves with the world at her feet.”—Charles Stephen,
Lincoln Journal StarTable of ContentsPreface
Part One
That’s Something
Jan’s Orchard
What Happens
Diction
The Sandhills, Early Winter
November Night Driving
Birthday
Sarah’s Wing
Conversation
My Daughter Home from College Tells Me about the Gods
April Teaching, Outstate
Native
Locus
Accident
Photograph of a Child Sleeping
Visions
Words
Town/County
Part Two
Dishes
What Happened This Summer
Saying Good-bye to the Property
Divorce
Shame, or the Computer Uses of Natural Language
1 September, 100 Degrees
Trying to Buy off Death
I Can’t. Yes, You Can
Worry about Meaning
Cradle
Family
Piecing
Plate xii
Assignment
Three Ways of Looking at It
Part Three
Gossip
Father
Women Raised in the Fifties
She
What Is Good
Lot’s Wives
Widow
Visitant
Some Other Women Now
I Am Sick
Part Four
Piecing the Universe Together with Dresses
She Speaks
Detail
Oracle
Pregnant Woman
Sabbath
Small Shelter
Pain
A Meeting with My Ex-Husband
High Ground
With Stanley Kunitz at the Car Wash
Part Five
Advice
Restraint
Journal Entry: The Tropics
Friend in a Distant City
Sex
Alone
Look
Lacunae
C3
Ambition
Helios at Bread Loaf, the Album
The Man
My Dream, Your Dream
September: Getting Married Again
Prospectus
Atonement
Bear
Version
Inside the Geese
Life Outside the Self: The Uncertainty Principle
Acknowledgments
