Ebook: Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems

Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry's poetry, on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form, and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing that coheres into a single, seemless work. In it she responds to the natural world, to philosophical dilemmas, to spiritual longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and, most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse a new, bright prospect, a "green place" on a farm in Virginia where time slows and holds and happiness abides.The kind of day when everything is so still it seems to be an image of itself, a mirrored photograph, and only the secret lives of insects, intense and determined among the leaves and grass, enact the motivations of the real.In this shadowless light of uncontaminated noon, a fence post gleams as if gilded, church spire where there is no church. The impossibly beautiful blossoms of the crab apple have spilled onto the ground, an imperturbable pool of pink and white. This illusion of the real, almost real.From "In the Field" published in Hazard and Prospectby Kelly Cherry. Copyright © 2007 by Kelly Cherry. All rights reserved.PRAISE FOR THE BOOK"Here Venus rises not dewy and innocent but knowing, "strong and free," a triumphant vision of femaleness that Cherry bestows as a benediction in the glorious closing poem, `To a Young Woman.'"--Booklist184 pages, 6 x 9This publication is supported in part by a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts.