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To Be in This Number (Triquarterly Books)

To Be in This Number (Triquarterly Books)
By Alane Rollings

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Product Description

With her fifth book of poetry, Alane Rollings continues to demonstrate her originality and her own poetic style. To Be In This Number shapes personal and national events in 20th Century--America into a narrative which begins before the Depression and ends after 9/11. The historical sweep includes the birth of Jazz, World War II (and antisemitism), the rise of rock music, the civil rights movement, and the expanding women's consciousness. Always keeping in mind the roles of both a national consciousness and the individual, Rollings examines a variety of themes surrounding family, race, and gender relationships to see how they have (or have not) progressed. True to Rollings' courageous style, each poem is part of an unusual journey through poetic narrative, profound emotion, and intimate language.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #3012000 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-09-13
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 104 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review

"As a spokesperson for the spirit, she has not only the ability but the obligation to be large, to encompass multitudes. Rollings is a fresh, vital voice, possessed of an extraordinary imagination." -Tony Hoagland, The Georgia Review


"I am much taken with Rollings's wild but striking ingenuities, her surprises that surprise a second time by their justice. By love and fear and dream she re-connects the psyche and the cosmos in a kind of Shakespearean shorthand." -Howard Nemerov


"If there could be such a thing as an original heart, I'd say it informs her remarkable, stirring poems. I certainly feel the magic of an original mind." -Stephen Dunn

Review

"If there could be such a thing as an original heart, I'd say it informs her remarkable, stirring poems. I certainly feel the magic of an original mind." -Stephen Dunn


"I am much taken with Rollings's wild but striking ingenuities, her surprises that surprise a second time by their justice. By love and fear and dream she re-connects the psyche and the cosmos in a kind of Shakespearean shorthand." -Howard Nemerov


"As a spokesperson for the spirit, she has not only the ability but the obligation to be large, to encompass multitudes. Rollings is a fresh, vital voice, possessed of an extraordinary imagination." -Tony Hoagland, The Georgia Review

About the Author
Alane Rollings attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Chicago. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Logic of Opposites (Northwestern University Press, 1998), The Struggle to Adore (Story Line Press, 1994), and Transparent Landscapes (Saint Luke's Press, 1984). Rollings lives in Hyde Park with her husbadn, novelist Richard Stern and teaches at the University of Chicago.

Customer Reviews

A Visionary, an Original5
Alane Rollings is one of the most erudite, nimble, and splendid contemporary poets I've ever read. If you doubt this, you might begin a great adventure of discovery by reading her latest book, to be in this number.

Consisting of twenty-four poems equally divided into three sections, the book takes readers on a dimension-bending roller coaster ride through history and Rollings's recollections of childhood. Many of the poems reveal in luxurious narrative the challenges and subtleties of family life and a Southern childhood; others meditate on the landscape of intellect, while all of them pinch and probe the nature of reality, and who we are in it at any moment.

Maureen N. McLane in Chicago Review suggested that Rollings's poems reminded her of no one so much as Rilke. It's an appropriate comparison. Here are excerpts from Poem #19, in no time, to illustrate the point.

"Though paralyzed, at 25, by my unmet demands,/I nearly swooned on meeting Prince André in War and Peace./...It's over 7,000 days since then. I've met with less-than-love:/at times, as overwillingness; at times, a an exacting will/whose clutch has crushed me deaf--dumb--numb./...That daydream was my doing!/...My hard-won solidity's dispelled my family's worries. Now, although/I'm undone in one fellow's princely gaze, my history of illumination/by a few extraordinary men can rebegin./A different form of Beauty--/with the usual romance--has made its old breath-taking sense./In no time, Love is news again."

I hope that you might love that last line as much as I do! We're led to it so delicately, yet so deftly! That beauty and love command capital letters is also telling and appropriate, for nothing is more important in Rollings's world view.

It's a view whose expression is utterly unique to Rollings. Other poets worship beauty and love, but few have ever done so while majestically balancing so precariously between an effervescent fragility and oak-like perseverance. In this sense, another poet comes to mind when I think of Rollings's timeless peers--John Keats.

Take a look at Rollings and see if you agree that she is utterly original. It's a blessing and a privilege to be able to enter her world, if only for the all-too-brief span of the pages in a marvelous book.

Robert McDowell (The Poetry Mentor), author of POETRY AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, forthcoming from Free Press in July, 2008.