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Two Forthcoming Books by Smith Poet
Ann Boutelle, senior lecturer in English language and
literature and founder of the Smith College Poetry
Center, will publish two books of poetry in the coming months, an unusual accomplishment.
Becoming Bone, a collection based on the life
of 19th-century American poet Celia Thaxter, will be released at the end of June
by the University of Arkansas Press. Thaxter (1835-94) was born in Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, and lived for many years in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Much of her poetry
pertains to the Isle of Shoals, where she lived for most of her life.
Nest of Thistles, which is due for release
in October by the University Press of New England, focuses on Boutelle’s childhood
in Scotland.
Nest of Thistles won the 2005 Samuel French
Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press, an award given annually to
an American poet for his or her first or second book of poems. Nest of Thistles is
Boutelle’s second book of poems (Becoming Bone is her first).
Below are comments on Boutelle’s forthcoming
volumes by other renowned poets.
Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer
in the Humanities, Mount Holyoke College, and editor of the Norton Anthology
of Poetry: "Annie Boutelle has chosen, in reimagining Thaxter's own voice,
to dramatize hints, silences, and the sea. The sorrows and victories of Thaxter's
life are conveyed with sensual, sonorous richness, and yet understatement. And yet,
if much of her inner life -- like that of so many women (some of them writers) --
went unwritten for a time, Becoming Bone has redressed the blankness with
empathy, depth, and a keen intelligence."
Eleanor Wilner, G.H. Conkling Writer in Residence at
Smith, and author of Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems: "Like
whaler's scrimshaw, images incised on shell and bone, Annie Boutelle’s lines
seem etched, indelible -- a laser-like intensity transmuting the most intractable
materials. In a language as spare, exact, and essential as necessity itself -- ‘past
flattering chatter, hypocrisies lush as weed on harbor rock’ -- Annie Boutelle
tears aside the flowery veils of feminine concealment of another age, to give voice
to the inner life of an islanded soul, the 19th-century writer Celia Thaxter."
Gerald Stern, former Poet Laureate of New Jersey,
and author of This Time: New and Selected Poems: "This is a magnificent
secret history -- of a time we now know very little, in spite of its closeness, and
of a remarkable spirit who lived in that time and is now forgotten. The poems are
stark, original, lovely, the poetic knowledge terrific. I am convinced that Annie
Boutelle is Celia Thaxter; only she (Annie) will not be forgotten. Read this fine
book."
Eavan Boland, director of the Creative Writing
Program, Stanford University, and author of nine volumes of poetry: "These are
poems of real lyric wisdom: the music is equal to the lived experience, and the experience
has found a true music, all of its own. The ghost of a father, the melody of a ghazal
-- whatever the surprising, poignant elements here, they all go to making this a
compelling, memorable book of poems."
 Margot
Livesey, author of Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing
Verona: "As I read Annie Boutelle's wise and generous poems, I felt that
I was learning how to love the living and the dead, the darkness and the light. Over
and over Boutelle transports the reader to a world both fiercely familiar and utterly
new, and the results are exhilarating."
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, author of Pharaoh's
Daughter and The Astrakhan Coat: "This volume bears witness
to a truly achieved voice and a hard-earned right to language. Like all the best
poetry, it is a language full of loss -- loss of homeland, childhood loss of a
brother and baby sister, loss of father and mother, loss even of language itself.
This gives the writing a powerful resonance, a quivering presence like a Highland
landscape seen through a summer heat haze. I loved this book from beginning to
end, I love its awareness of the constant presence of death and its equally careful
enunciation of the exuberant details of life."
Henri Cole, author of five volumes of poetry: "Annie
Boutelle's poems are muscular and clean. She writes with her ear. And though death
often clings to the edges of them, it unexpectedly breathes life into the surface
of things. If you listen, you can hear a heart’s quiet roar." |
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About Becoming
Bone: