Mysteries of Small Houses: Poems (Penguin Poets)
A poetry collection that traces childhood memory and poetic growth through dense, fragmentary language. Private experience rises together with the atmosphere of an era.
Work Information
Fragments of memory begin to take shape as poems.
This collection revisits the poet’s childhood in the California desert, her growth as a writer, and her relationships with the people she has loved. Layering images like a collage, it transforms private time into a rich poetic space.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- 1998-06-01
- Pages
- 160 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.2 x 1 x 22.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780140588965
- ISBN-10
- 9780140588965
- Price
- 5210 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
A Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Los Angeles Time Book Prize An autobiographical collection of poetry by Alice Notley, "One of America's greatest poets" (Poetry Foundation) Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.
Alice Notley (1945 -2025) was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. She is the author of more than forty books of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Disobedience (Penguin, 2001, winner of the Griffin Prize); and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 , which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her honors also include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Reviews
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i am very glad to have found this single book of poems online and for such a good price. very happy to have this edition
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Amazing.
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I did not care for this poet's poems and they were very forgettable as a result.
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An accomplished and moving book, Mysteries of Small Houses shows Alice Notley writing at the top of her form. Her autobiographical poems are rich and detailed, with an immediacy of attention that derives from her roots in the second-generation New York school, and which is used here to show the reader what it was like to have lived, at no small cost, a life dedicated to poetry. There's a highly individual sensibility at work here, and an admirable one.