Poetry by Kelly CherryThe Retreats of Thought: Poems
See Larger Image In this book-length sonnet sequence, Kelly Cherry explores the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new ones, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. A former philosophy student in graduate school, she retains a deep love of philosophical inquiry and maintains that our lives are intimately bound to the philosophical choices we make. Conscious study of our choices, Cherry believes, can lead to greater freedom. Passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry, these succinct poems concern themselves with very large matters--the nature of time, the definitions of goodness and beauty, the aims of art, our limited knowledge of the world--and illustrate with aching clarity that philosophical problems dominate our lives as does the sky.
Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems
See Larger Image Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry's poetry, on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form, and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing that coheres into a single, seemless work. In it she responds to the natural world, to philosophical dilemmas, to spiritual longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and, most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse a new, bright prospect, a "green place" on a farm in Virginia where time slows and holds and happiness abides.
Rising Venus: Poems
See Larger Image Cherry, an accomplished poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and essayist, draws readers deep into women's territory in her beautifully choreographed sixth collection. Writing from a woman's point of view in poems that are sometimes larky, always precise and stealthily powerful, she articulates various stages of a woman's coping with lost love, moving sure-footedly from witticisms to a joltingly candid depiction of depression and madness. Initially skeletal in form, her poems fill out and gain muscle, weight, and authority as heartache gives way to a renewed passion for life and faith in art. Here Venus rises not dewy and innocent but knowing, "strong and free," a triumphant vision of femaleness that Cherry bestows as a benediction in the glorious closing poem, "To a Young Woman." --Donna Seaman
An Other Woman
Death and Transfiguration: Poems
See Larger Image In her latest, deeply moving collection, Kelly Cherry confronts the basic questions of love and death, faith and suffering. From her search for "a new poetry", Cherry wrests a passionate, authoritative, powerful vision that is itself transfiguring. DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION focuses on the wisdom one gains from pain rather than on the pain itself. Cherry grasps her anguish to see how much she can stand.
Time out of Mind
God's Loud Hand: Poems
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Benjamin John
Natural Theology
Songs for a Soviet Composer
Relativity: A Point of View (Classic Contemporaries)
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Lovers and Agnostics (Classic Contemporary)
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A New Pleiade: Selected Poems (Poetry)
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Retreats of Thought
In this book-length sonnet sequence, Kelly Cherry explores the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new ones, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. A former... More..
Girl in a Library
Girl in a Library is an essay collection about coming of age and asserting authority as a Southern woman writer and reader of her generation, as well as review essays about diverse Southern women writers... More..
Rising Venus
Cherry, an accomplished poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and essayist, draws readers deep into women's territory in her beautifully choreographed sixth collection... More..