Worldling

By Elizabeth Spires

Book Overview

Winner of a 1996 Whiting Award. In her fourth collection of poems Elizabeth Spires addresses the elemental subjects of life and of literature: birth, death, creation, and intimations of immortality. The first section focuses on the experiences of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth from the points of view of both mother and child. The second section offers a reversal and reply in which the poems move out into a divided and divisive world. These poems are distinguished by an immaculate lyricism, a pristine sense for the natural world and the rhythms of language.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393316289
• ISBN13: 9780393316285
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 76 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Worldling

I first found Elizabeth Spires' poem "Truro" published in The New Yorker when I was in high school, and it became one of my "foundation" poems, the poems that inspired me to read and eventually write poetry. Now years later, I am still captivated by her work.Worldling speaks eloquently and sharply about universal experiences, framing them in terms both unexpected and completely familiar. One of my other favorite poems in this collection is "Theatre of Pain", a searing, honest, and beautiful account of labor and childbirth. Elizabeth Spires gives a voice to the unspeakable things:TRUROI found a white stone on the beachinlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.All night I'd slept in fits and starts,my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.And then morning. And then a walk,the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.I felt its calm power as I held itand wished a wish I cannot tell.It fit in my hand like a hand gentlyholding my hand through a sleepless night.A stone so like, so unlike,all the others it could only be mine.The wordless white stone of my life!