My Shining Archipelago (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780300070323)

Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, ""Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin."" This cycle of ""freewheeling sonnets"" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.

Author: Talvikki Ansel
ISBN-10: 0300070322
ISBN-13: 9780300070323
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/27/1997
Pages: 70
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.26lbs
Size: 9.26h x 5.57w x 0.21d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/01/1997 pg. 107