Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2005 [Paperback]

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles—an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet’s times. Notley’s poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.Author’s Note
from Love Poems
2/? Saturday”
Friday Midnight Exactly
Cold Poem
I Hope I’m Not Here Next Year
from 165 Meeting House Lane
1.
4.
15.
22.
Dear Dark Continent
Incidentals in the Day World
Your Dailiness
But He Says I Misunderstood
from Songs for the Unborn Second Baby
from I
“Alice ordered me to be made”
The Virtue of Uncreatedness
Endless Day
30th Birthday
January
How Spring Comes
Little Egypt
Sonnet
A California Girlhood
Poem (“St. Mark’s Place caught at night in hot summer,”)
When I Was Alive
After Tsang Chih
Today
You
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
Untitled
“If she says that she’s the goddess Fortune”
The World, All That Live & All That Occur
Bus Stop
Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice
The Locket
September’s Book
A True Account of Talking to Judy Holiday, October 13
Poem (“You hear that heroic big land music?”)
The Prophet
Desert for All of Music to Take Place
Untitled (“Cloudsl3)