Works and Days

by Bernadette Mayer

Overview

A brand spanking new collection, Works and Days is classic Bernadette Mayer: fresh, learned, exciting, and endlessly surprising

Part springtime journal (“why are there thorns?”), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times’ passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, “Go Away” welcome mats, books, floods (“never of dollar money”), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225175
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Called “a consummate poet” by Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Editorial Reviews

Most of [Mayer's] 20-odd books and collaborations show by effusive, charming, sometimes hyperbolic example how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation. Instead, her unrhymed sonnets, her seemingly slapdash odes, her versified diary entries let her, and her readers, live in the moment, opening us up to other people's cares and joys and wishes and words…Mayer is the writing sort of anarchist—the effusive sort, the kind who hopes, with William Blake, that poems can free us from our mind-forged manacles…Mayer's poems…have the playfulness of a wise child, even when they reflect on our endangered planet, or on her advancing age…Yeats said that a finished poem should click shut like a box. Mayer's poems never do; instead, they stay open—to her, to her populous, flowering world and to the readers who might complete, or imitate, or simply live with them, taking their rough patches and digressions as part of her inviting whole.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Burt

05/16/2016
The prolific Mayer (Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words) gives a nod to Hesiod as she meticulously and humanistically deliberates on the ways that various environments—including the natural, political, and economic—influence the personal. The collection is constructed around a series of first-person meditations, reminiscent of diary entries, that document the indecisiveness of modern weather patterns (“Winter forgot its car keys”) and the waking of the natural world as summer reluctantly arrives (“The peonies start, the fig tree made it. I think it’s raining now, it’s like a misting tent”). Mixed in with the book’s measured documentation of several months are personal lists, bits about tenant protests against landlords from New York state history, jumble puzzles from the daily paper, notes on climate change, and more. In this way the history and present moment of a place gain equal importance. As time passes, Mayer, with characteristic humor, inventive language, and straightforwardness, creates a work that is at once hopeful, anticapitalist, and deeply invested in the personal. Mayer’s poems often juxtapose the concepts of nature and ownership, but nature always wins out: “property is robbery, give everybody/ everything, other birds walk this way too.” (June)

Publishers Weekly

"The richness of life & time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work."

John Ashbery

"Powered by Mayer’s unique reflections on the mythologies of social and linguistic order, Works & Days possesses a rare combination of artfulness, critical acumen, and personality. The end result is a book that is at once formally inventive and disturbingly of our times."

NBCC - Michael Miller

"Her latest collection, “Works and Days,” which came out this June, is among her very best, colliding daily struggles (menstruation, money) with natural obsessions (blue herons, mushrooms) and big unanswerable questions (Is motherhood virtuous? Whither patriarchy?). All of this is undergirded by a hefty serving of irony… Mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that is nonsense: I can’t think of a better centering device in these topsy-turvy times."

The New Yorker - Daniel Wenger

"One of the most interesting, exciting, and open experimental poets."

San Francisco Chronicle - Tom Clark

"Mayer’s poetic career embodies that generous impulse: Most of her 20-odd books and collaborations show by effusive, charming, sometimes hyperbolic example how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation. Instead, her unrhymed sonnets, her seemingly slapdash odes, her versified diary entries let her, and her readers, live in the moment, opening us up to other people’s cares and joys and ­wishes and words, in the New York City art scene where she began and in the greener parts of New York State — ­“Albany and Rensselaer counties” — that provide her territory now."

The New York Times - Stephen Burt

"Works & Days shows a veteran poet as relentless innovator."

The Brooklyn Rail - William Lessard

"Love and the seasons and the exigencies and opportunities of daily survival are the inevitable occasions of a body of work that is as radical as it is Horatian, able as little else is both to delight and instruct."

Boston Review - Edwin Frank

"Sly, spry and unpretentious..."

Chicago Tribune - Michael Robbins