The Ruined Elegance: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Description

A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment. Cover Title Copyright Contents I WRONG EPIC Given Silence Towering I Wait for the Ruined Elegance Back from the Aegean Sea In the Thick of It Ionian Supper Partita, but Nothing to Do with Bach Few Days before Christmas II IN A GODLESS TIME Beginning Spring Massacre Mausoleum Backstage Day Seven Center of a Journey Am I What the Lake Gave Me Meditation Dusty Citadel III THE BOOK, A SIMPLER GRAVE To Whom It May Concern Granted Asylum Against Prologue To Survive When It Must Midnight Almanac Yield, Please Anna Akhmatova, or the Thoughts She Didn’t Write An Uprising Committed to Longhand Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz took more than fifty years before writing Ravensbrück down in La Traversée de la nuit Chosen by the Narrator Cantabile (ma stonato) IV CAUGHT IN DEFIANCE Transparent Ink Painting from the Joseon Dynasty What’s Left of a Sijo Chiaroscuro, 2 a.m. Bonnard’s Naked Wife Leaving the Bathtub La Chambre d’écoute Three Moves, Clockwise Om dhrung svaha My Hiroshige Peintre Jardins sous la pluie NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS