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Nov 04, 2014 | ISBN 9781609805944 Buy
Feb 10, 2015 | ISBN 9781609805951 Buy
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Available from:
Nov 04, 2014 | ISBN 9781609805944
Feb 10, 2015 | ISBN 9781609805951
The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today. Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud’s poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late ’70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late ’80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.
An internationally renowned sculptor, novelist, and poet, BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD took to the arts at an early age. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, she started to play the piano, sculpt, and write poetry before entering high school. Chase-Riboud went on to receive a… More about Barbara Chase-Riboud
“Not surprisingly, what impresses is the poetry’s push and power, combined with fierce historical/political awareness.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal“The livingness of the body is in these poems . . . Barbara Chase-Riboud comes at you whole, all of her at once, the way only a real talent makes possible.” —Arthur Miller“The poems, like the sculpture, are a lucid reflection of their creator; tensile strength tempered with softness. Poetry, as she sees it, is a natural extension . . . a trip from one three dimensional world to another.” —The Washington Post
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