Product Description
Brigit Pegeen Kelly creates a magical landscape of sound-patterns, myths and surreal encounters, celebrating the mystery and surprise of creation. She is one of the best-loved poets writing in the United States today, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This work will last
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, as John Ashbery said of Elizabeth Bishop, is a "poet's poet's poet."The two volumes collected here, and the work they represent, are still underknown in the US, but they are works of genius to which British readers should consider themselves wildly lucky to be introduced."Dead Doe," "The Dragon," and "Rose of Sharon," recently reprinted in the spring issue of *American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets*, have served me as fresh reminders of Kelly's highly individual mastery and mystery, and why not spread the word?

Diann Blakely, author of HURRICANE WALK, FAREWELL, MY LOVELIES, and CITIES OF FLESH AND THE DEAD ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Great Collection
A friend of mine turned me on to Kelly and I am happy she did.This stuff is so vivid, so colorful and full of haunting images.True delight.

beautiful and painful
Brigit Kelly's title poem is, truly, the best poem I have ever read.It is so filled with suffering and sweetness, interwoven, I could hardly stand it; it blew my mind.The entire book is wonderful.Kelly's poems radiateintelligence and bare-bones honesty.She dives into the pain and truth andloveliness of life and takes you along with her, but even with all theintensity in her writing, she leaves you feeling somehow safe in the world. If you can find her first book somewhere (it's out of print) find it, too. It also cuts to the quick.Please, Brigit, give us another book!

Four corners of the Night
Compare this to what?Chagall dreaming at dusk near a pasture? . . . Kelly's poems paint their way into your mind through your eyes, in short, brush-saturated strokes of paint.Her short lines, full of amazingenjambments, lull you out of adulthood.But it's not all pleasant. There's a lot to be afraid of.But there's so much beauty (in all thatmystery) after you catch your breath. Kelly's poem-paintings are drippingwith nightmares and dreamlight.

Changing, Inescapable, True
Senuous; This book is composed of the stretchings of this woman's life. I had the opportunity to hear her read and I will never feel the same way about age or sex or truth again. ... Read more

Product Description

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

Customer Reviews (4)

Breathtaking
Reading The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is an indescribable experience, like listening to Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony or a Bach fugue.Stunned by hypnotic images, the reader is grabbed by the throat and ripped into a labyrinth of numinous voices, quickening classical statues, dripping mist, rotting fruit, flapping wings and a pulsing sense of the presence of music and danger.Kelly's poetry is breathtaking in its language and force.Reading one poem creates an insatiable thirst to read everything this remarkable poet has written.

Great work
I just love the place she has created on earth where her poems can happen.

Not bad stuff, but exceptionally heavy.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004)

The Orchard is the kind of book one doesn't see too often these days; it's poetry that's "academic" in the trust sense of the word, thick almost to the point of unreadability with diction that's just this side of archaic, layer upon layer of symbolism, and all that sort of thing that makes high school and college English professors foam at the mouth. There is little doubt in my mind, having read this book, that Kelly is on the fast track to canonization; this is substantiated by The Orchard having been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award this year. Because of all this, there's the temptation to compare her to poets already in the canon (there's certainly a good argument to be made for comparing her style and diction, and probably substance, to that of, say, Pound, or to a lesser extent Eliot). I'll try to avoid it, given the length limits I'm stuck with, but those with more room than I have might want to take a crack at it.

The basic problem with the canon is that, while it's often beautiful work (as is the case here), it sometimes lets the simple factors of readability and accessibility fall by the wayside in order to be deep. The best poets who flirt with canonization-- Li-Young Lee is the one who springs immediately to mind-- have the depth and flavor, but also have that surface layer that says "here's a poem; if all you get out of it is what you see on the surface, that's okay." Kelly's work has a marked absence of this trait; the language itself almost seems to be pointing the reader toward the depths, saying "in order to get anything out of this poem, you'd best come armed with a knowledge of mythology, and an OED would probably help as well." Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's likely to turn away those not yet familiar with poetry these days; as we all know, at the turn of the twenty-first century, "those not yet familiar with poetry" is, well, almost everyone.

Recommended for advanced readers. Newcomers to the scene might want to go with a little lighter reading.

Struck
A few decades back, when Jon Anderson wrote that "the secret of poetry is cruelty," he must have had something like Brigit Kelly's poems in mind. Kelly's third book, The Orchard, continues her fascination with the suffering and cruelty that lies somewhere between the animal and the human, obsessing over pain directly linked with physical beauty.

It's important to note that the speaker in Kelly's poem is a witness to suffering rather than an instigator. She seeks to comfort and justify those in pain, the human and animal, the living and the dead, to name them with poetical power, as she does a diseased dog in "The Wolf," linking that dog to wolf and then wolf to myth, making "of her something / Better than she could make of herself".This poem is one of the finest in a collection full of fine poems.

And Kelly likes her descriptions steeped in beauty and terror. In the last line of "Elegy" she writes, "Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow."That violent "struck" means everything to Kelly's poetics. It's subtle, hidden between the blinding purity of the lilies and the snow. ... Read more

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Word count: 955. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 1994. The length of the article is 995 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The pear tree. (Poem)
Author: Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1994
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n1Page: p 73(3)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 1994. The length of the article is 337 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Of royal issue. (Poem)
Author: Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1994
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n1Page: p 72(1)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 877 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The dance.(Poetry)(Poem)
Author: Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2004
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 62Issue: 2Page: 320(2)

Article Type: Poem

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Chapters: Eleanor Wilner, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Barbara Ras, Debra Spark, Sebastian Matthews, Adria Bernardi, A. Van Jordan, Debra Allbery. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 30. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Eleanor Rand Wilner (born 1937 Ohio) is an American poet, and editor. She graduated from Goucher College, and from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. She was editor of The American Poetry Review, and she is Advisory Editor of Calyx. She has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Smith College. She is on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in Philadelphia. She has been active in civil rights and peace movements. ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=25387268 ... Read more

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Turn to "Poetry for Students" to get your research done in record time. Brought to you by Thomson Gale--the world's leading source of literary criticism and analysis--this e-doc contains: author biography; poem summary; poem text (if available); discussion of the work's themes, style, and historical context; a compendium of in-depth critical material; study questions; suggestions for further reading; and much more.

Why choose "Poetry for Students"? Because no other source offers so much in such a compact package. Trust the experts: Thomson Gale--and "Poetry for Students." ... Read more

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A volume of poetry and fiction published by Bucknell University. ... Read more