Satin Cash: Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar

Overview

"[Her poetry] is the perfect marriage of the realism of William Carlos Williams and the sleepless heaven-seeking... of Dickinson and Hopkins."—Virginia Quarterly Review

In the wake of Blue Venus, called "a virtuoso book" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, comes this ravishing volume of bodily, even carnal prayers, that quiver with the ecstasy and anguish of longing. Lisa Russ Spaar has long produced poems that emit a palpable, devotional Eros, but Satin Cash is a raw, more elemental invocation of human yearning—a startling song of worship and fetish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892553433
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	08/17/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collections of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson; Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems; and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

Emily Dickinson's phrase "I pay-in Satin Cash/ You did not state-your price-" serves as both epigraph and title source for Spaar's third book, though Spaar also includes poems inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, Hart Crane and Robert Frost, a combination that captures the collection's fervent compressions, devotions and raptures. The natural world in these poems is sensual and seductive, as in "Vineyard in Spring," in which she writes: "The world is prevalent, strained/ with the old work of beginning again,// smalt, sexual, congested with blossom." Birds flock throughout as apparitions and manifestations, paramours and confessors-mourning doves moan, a trapped wren chirs, cardinals shuttle in the hedge. In an address to the wood thrush, Spaar writes: "Blackamoor of hedges, achromatic:/ teach me your harmonics,// daedal, damson: ghosts/ of two notes, one throat." Spaar (Blue Venus) has created an entrancing world of lush language and passionate imaginings, where a womb is a "chivalric piñata,/ quixotic hourglass," and a turtle appears "emerging from its stone/ velvet, vulnerable," poems as beautiful and fragile as the creatures and gardens they contain. (Aug.)

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