The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans by Mary Jo Bang


The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
Title : The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 082032292X
ISBN-10 : 9780820322926
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 80
Publication : First published March 1, 2001

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world.

Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places--inside and outside the human psyche.

The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans Reviews

  • Michael

    from The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans by Mary Jo Bang:

    The Beauties of Nature


    She'd grown tired, she admitted,
    of the picturesque—
    pretty pipers piped

    against a backdrape of pineapple yellow.
    She closed here eyes
    to it and it went away.

    In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand
    in the water-lilied water
    and wondered at the weather.

    Twenty starlings twittered.
    The day had been
    dieted down to twelve hours of light

    and cushioned between two storms.
    She thought
    she could see through

    the muggy dusk a balloon
    bobbing in the distance, dripping
    an empty basket.

    What is Reason but a lid?
    she asked herself.
    What is Death but the end

    of a season.
    Like smoke her last thought
    rose in the lead

    air and hovered
    above her head. Her head
    swam in the glittery

    pool of all the gone beloveds.
    One by one
    she held them under.