Magdalena (Marie Alexander Poetry Series) | Maureen Gibbon

book: Magdalena (Marie Alexander Poetry Series) | Maureen Gibbon

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Magdalena (Marie A...

	Magdalena (Marie Alexander Poetry Series) Maureen Gibbon White Pine Press, 2007 - 80 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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"Gibbon's Magdalena offers a fresh and profound voice to American poetry. Comparisons are impossible because this book doesn't remind me of anything I've read in years. I loved it."-Jim Harrison

Magdalena is a finely drawn collection which, with sometimes painful honesty, examines the vagaries and vicissitudes of a heart in conflict with itself. The poems invoke the nature of an independent woman embracing her sexuality, travels, and being in the world.

Maureen Gibbon is the author of a novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow. She teaches at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota.

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woman poet explores different experiences while keeping her sense of self

Gibbon's prose poems track what makes a woman, and what she is after she is made. Regarding the former, "On the island, women are moored like boats...They are tied to logs sunken in the shore-bottom or to metal rings along the shore sea wall of the port...[with] a blue world [the men] do not know how to see or harvest. Sometimes a plank of wood splits in one of the boats...She may also split silently so that you would never know." [from Un Bruit Qui Court] Regarding the later, "[b]ooks and paintings, languages and cities...were sweet to want but they didn't change me. They did not shape me the way picking row after row of pears did...All those years, and I still feel like that girl who worked hard, who worked hard all the time." [from Work]

But not all for Gibbon is biographical and reflective. There are times when longing arises. But even "in love I keep a part of myself separate. The animals stay in my dreams and their hearts beat in each house I make...." [from Kicking Horse My True Husband; the title poem of a collection of this poet which was a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets] Through dreamy imagery, hardship, or longing, Gibbon never looses herself.

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