Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America's greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement ... Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.
The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in ""Red Trousseau,"" ""hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal,"" to the sun in ""Unsent letter."" in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that ""the scene, infinite, rebegins"" In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red-the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros it self, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft. ""With Red Trousseau, Carol Muske achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought.
She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation with its humanity- terror, sometimes courage, excessive need, and the stubborn twin habits of hope and representation. This is urgent and beautifully confident
work.'-Jorie Graham
By:
Carol Muske
Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions:
Height: 210mm,
Width: 139mm,
Spine: 7mm
Weight: 104g
ISBN: 9780140586862
ISBN 10: 0140586865
Series: Penguin Poets
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 01 September 1993
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Red TrousseauI To the Muse, New Year's Eve, 1990 Stage & Screen, 1989 Field Trip In-Flight Flick Theories of Education Frog Pond Little L.A. Villanelle II Red Trousseau Alchemy, She Said My Sister Not Painting, 1990 Kenya Insomnia Lucifer Prague: Two Journals M. Butterfly Character III Unsent Letter Unsent Letter 2 Unsent Letter 3 (Retro Vivo) Unsent Letter 4: Last Take Barra de Navidad: Envoi About the Author
Carol Muske is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels, Dear Digby and Saving St. Germ. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including Guggenheim, NEA, and Ingram-Merrill fellowships. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
Reviews for Red Trousseau: Poems
A back-to-the-land and back-to-the-old-ways collection of often charming autobiographical essays. Wetherell, a novelist (The Wisest Man in America, 1995, etc.), and short-story writer and a longtime resident of the hill country of western New Hampshire, is a resolutely happy man, blessed, he writes, with a perfect mate and a perfect home. He finds his happiness to be due in large part to the simplicity of his life; he owns no television, writes only grudgingly on an electric typewriter, and refuses to purchase a computer. Wetherell occasionally belabors his us-against-the-world stance, but he has a point; his book is full of little pieces on life's simple pleasures, like reading, or gazing at the stars, or contemplating the history of his forebears and the ways of his neighbors. I am revealing myself to be as extinct as a dinosaur, dead as a dodo, a relic of another era, a footnote to an age that not only rushes ahead in heedless bondage to the new, but tramples in contempt on anyone who stubbornly refuses to keep pace, he writes. That stubbornness takes a sometimes curmudgeonly tone, as when Wetherell grumps at the noises his neighbors make with their V8 engines and boom boxes. But more often Wetherell is a courtly critic of the modern age, an age in which it's becoming impossible to live with any kind of economic modesty, even way out in the sticks. Still, he sees signs of hope for a return to at least some of the old ways, including a reemerging ethos of repairing rather than discarding, a yearning for community, and a newfound reverence . . . for the land. A pleasing declaration in favor of the country life. (Kirkus Reviews)
