|
White Sea is a dazzling outpouring of eloquence from a poet who has risen, book by book, to this high tide of lyrical power. White Sea is obsessed with how we see and how we turn away from seeing. What the reader will see immediately here is that Cleopatra Mathis has written poems bitter as salt and blinding as the light of revelation—clear, gem-bright, and relentless as waves. White Sea is a major work of art.
—Carol Muske-Dukes
Cleopatra Mathis' poetry "enthralls without throwing the reader off a cliff. And all the while she brandishes the gifts of a talented poet who has hit her stride."
—The New York Times Book Review
As long as we have Cleopatra Mathis' clarity of imagination, the intricacy and breadth of her engagement with the world, and the depth of her meeting of others, we'll have the warmth to help us deal with our own centers of cold. —A.R. Ammons
Cleopatra Mathis' poems have long been known for their richness of image and sound, and in White Sea the language is as generous as ever. But in this new work the target of the poet's vision is more jagged and elusive. "I have lost my killer instinct for beauty," Mathis writes. Struggling to find a voice in the face of the death of a close friend and the threatened loss of others, she doubts the adequacy of language and the consolations of nature. Constructing her own eschatology, Mathis embarks upon a crucial confrontation with last things, one that questions the beginnings of her identity as a Greek child in Louisiana and carries forward into the landscape of the outer shore of Cape Cod. What she sees and cannot see governs these poems. Everywhere, the poet is haunted by the unrealized and unknowable soul. The work of one who has given up preoccupations with beauty's easy surfaces and the need to defend the self, White Sea is filled with beauty after all, as well as power, audacity, and delight.
Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press, and are distributed by University Press of New England. Her most recent book, What to Tip the Boatman?, won the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001. A new collection of poems, White Sea, will be published by Sarabande Books in July, 2005. Cleopatra Mathis' work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; a Pushcart Prize; the Robert Frost Award; a 1981-82 Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Since 1982, Cleopatra Mathis has been Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where she directs the creative writing program. She lives with her family in Hanover, New Hampshire.
|
