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Trace of One



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2002
66 pages
Paper: 
$19.00
0-87745-806-5
978-0-87745-806-7
eBook, 120 day ownership: 
$10.00
eBook, perpetual ownership: 
$19.00
1-58729-410-9
978-1-58729-410-5

“Joanna Goodman . . . [is] an extraordinary talent. . . . Her poetry taunts us with abutting styles, juxtaposing as it does the sacred and profane, the lyric and colloquial. . . . [She] provides us with work of special genius.”—Eric Sellin, Literary Review

“In this remarkable first book, Joanna Goodman finds language for conveying extreme stages of emotion, whether belonging to modern lovers or to ritual participants in New Guinea. . . . Goodman depicts sorrows in such a way as to make them our sorrows, the joys our joys.”—Grace Schulman, author of The Paintings of Our Lives

“The poems in Joanna Gooman's Trace of One hover between the physical and spiritual worlds. They are poems of hectic grace, busy converting one matter into another, transforming identrity and space, and bridging distances while discovering new ones. . . . And what propels a reader through Trace of One is the affecting confidence with which Goodman interrogates mystery—not the least of which is a relationship, which she regards with careful awe. Here we have a poet of luminous observation, sharing a voice both vulnerable and daring in its humanity . . . a startling first collection.”—Crossroads

In Trace of One,real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speaker’s physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodman’s poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacement—they are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradise—they celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.

Table of contents: 

Contents

I

Tebaide

…Took Form Again

Falser Certainty

de’ Fiori

The Succession of Parts

Take Aim

Beech Tree in March

Enchanted

Benares

A Light Arch of Cloud, Ten Fingers Wide

On the Holy Friar Crossing a Suspension Bridge to Paradise

Conversion

This Is Joy

Directions

Pian dell’Arca

Coming of Age

 

II

Wave

Trace of One

How Did You Come to Know

Reasons for Everything

Of Force and Distance

Where to End

Port de Grave

Departure

Watermark

What Brought Them There

The Aftermath

Resuscitation

Recitative

The Dry Spell

After Being Called Naïve, I Consult The Single Source for People Who Need to Be Right

Examples of Use

What You Can Expect This Month

Coming Up Violets

The Moon Smiled Cheekily

Home

Laws of Motion

In an Excessive Corridor

Notes

»