The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement

Auteur

Diane Lockward is the author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop and four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement. She is the recipient of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Woman of Achievement Award. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac.

Texte du rabat

Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab of sunset before it disappears. The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, with its cryptic title, invites us to join her in nothing less than a poetic banquet where we are seduced by the "Red of the raspberry, its drupelets a nest of sexual seeds, / and the music, pepper hot and red," or challenged by the never-ending unwinding of Lockward's interior landscape seeking its exterior expression in the physical world around her: "I build a nest of silken floss / and tiny twigs, / watch the lives on the other side." Make no mistake, though, the artistic weaving in these poems is tough as knots that "hold their weight, that won't come undone." This book is a feast to which Garcia Lorca himself would give a five-star rating. -Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2005-2009