Received: Rope, poems by Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Penguin Poets (Penguin Books), 2009
From the publisher:
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.
Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:
“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”
Sample poems (with audio):
Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:
“Pandora on Prozac”
“Specimens Collected at the Clearcut”
“Glooscap in Wolfville”
Terrain.org micro review:
As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times? Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.
Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.
I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.
The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.
If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.
On Thursday, September 24th, Terrain.org held its first-ever public issue launch and reading, celebrating 
Themocracy