Search results for ""Author Martha Kapos""

These new poems by Martha Kapos represent an act of reclamation or capture: an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur ' - a thing is most itself when likened' Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing 'being most itself'. Most often the viewpoints are visual ones - making use of the phenomenon of perspective with its effects of hiddenness, distance or diminution. In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an example of the animating power of metaphor to reshape loss into presence.

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Martha Kapos imagines sonata form as a narrative structure in this remarkable, and psychologically acute, showcase for poems written over nearly 30 years. With an afterword by Lawrence Kramer: Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?

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Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a very distinctive, unique atmosphere - graver here than in her previous collection. "Supreme Being" is both a huge hymn of praise for 'life', for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss - the loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the poet's own 'experiencing': themes as grave and profound as can be imagined. These are the substance of religious feeling and - without overt religious referencing - "Supreme Being" earns its bold title.

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