Winner
of the 2003 Word Press First Book Prize: Rotary by Christina Pugh
The poems in Christina
Pugh’s Rotary, winner of
the 2003 Word Press First Book Prize, display a fine-grained attention
to the world’s particulars that prompts a slowing down of readerly
perception until the object, the feeling, the idea, is experienced in
its full tactile presence. These are, in many senses, sensational poems.
Sample
Poems by Christina Pugh
Christina Pugh is the author of Gardening
at Dusk, a chapbook of poems published by Wells College Press. She
has received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from Poetry magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize,
the Associated Writing Programs’ INTRO Award in Poetry, a Whiting Fellowship
for the Humanities, and two nominations for a Pushcart Prize, among other
honors. Her poems have recently appeared in The
Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art,
Poetry Daily, and in the anthology Poetry
180: A Turning Back to Poetry. She holds degrees from Wesleyan University,
Harvard University, and Emerson College, and is currently visiting assistant
professor of English at Northwestern University.
“If it is true that a good poem defines an emotion not found in any
dictionary, then Christina Pugh is an astute lexicographer of the heart.”—Billy
Collins
“‘To have a child / you have to love the world enough / to show it to a stranger for the first time.’ (from ‘On Paternity’) In this gorgeous collection, Christina Pugh’s musical intelligence, her painterly eye, her elegant ferocity, take on the world as if to show it to the reader for the first time. The poems’ embrace is wide and deep—spiritual and erotic desire, the histories of paintings and painters, wildflowers and tamer ones (even the remembered triumph of a young mother’s style, circa 1973, a polyester dress imprinted with images of the Wright brothers, the first in flight). There is a tough-minded delicacy that tells me Pugh’s poems will be speaking with us for a very long time.”—Gail Mazur
“The reader of Christina Pugh’s poetry enters a realm of change, mystery, and beauty. Objects metamorphose—flowers, paintings, a forgotten dress—melding into the unfamiliar while remaining, or becoming, luminous versions of what they already are. Language is the agent of these transformations, and language, and the ways we use and are used by it, is the subject of many of these poems. In them and through them, we experience a poet’s wonder at words; we accompany her in her process of discovery and creation where words unfurl into images which transmute into landscapes we can inhabit. As in ‘Amaryllis,’ where “From one green trunk of stem, / four flowers rise to separate music,’ each poem opens up, and out; as in ‘Hydrangea,’ we are invited to view and savor places we have not seen, ‘hinterlands / between rose and violet.’ The journey embarked on in ‘The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent: A Catalogue’ is the journey of all these poems: from surface dazzlement through deepening stages of pleasure to that threshold to other worlds only art can offer: ‘the leafy door to the unformed.’”—Bruce Bennett
“The sinuous music of Christina Pugh’s Rotary is the sound of sense fleshing itself out, thought making its presence felt. She’s a poet of fine discernments and wild surmises, lucidly tracking the ambit of language to ‘the tip / of the known world, all its limits / shimmering.’ Her poems speak of cities lost and found, the secret histories of flowers and paintings, essential gestures and certain slants of light—touchstones one and all for a fluent lyricism that earns its keep by way of a supple feel for measure, a lapidary aptitude for the luminous particular, and a nervy intimacy with the uncanny. This is that rare first book that knows its own mind, persuading us that alertness can be one of the higher forms of artfulness.”—David Barber
ISBN 1932339245, 80 pages, $17.00