"All she wanted was the sea and the stars,/the overpowering closeness of them," Patricia Corbus writes in the poem "What She Wanted." No other American poet in recent memory has been as imaginative as Corbus in making this "overpowering closeness" a palpable reality. Not since Wallace Stevens has a poet so perfectly merged technical agility and philosophic maturity. Not since Richard Wilbur has a poet displayed such an exact and penetrating wit.
In a time when American poetry has become overwhelmed by the occasional and superficial, by a lack of attention to poetic tradition, it is especially pleasing to welcome such a masterful poet of depth and grace. Readers who have been waiting for an American poet who can match the seriousness of Larkin and Heaney, Cassian and Milosz, must no longer wait. In Ashes, Jade, Mirrors, Patricia Corbus redefines the landscape of American poetry.
Praise for Ashes, Jade, Mirrors
"Here are some poems that Wallace Stevens did not have time to write. But he might have, had he been a woman poet, living in late twentieth-century Florida. Patricia Corbus possesses such robust skills of diction and syntax, it gives her poems a range and authority uncommon in our time-darkly dignified to address our knowledge of mortality, and tropically cuckoo to make the claim for joy. This is a noble, polished book of poems, full of surprises both earthy and sophisticated. Patricia Corbus is a gutsy, very talented poet."--Tony Hoagland
Patricia Corbus lives in Sarasota, Florida, where she was born in 1936. With
its confluence of writers, artists and circus performers, the Sarasota she knew
growing up was more exotic, and much smaller, than it is today. The city's once
unusual population nurtured her imagination, as did the many hours she spent
playing and later working in her parents' shell shop, The Nautilus, which was
filled with specimen shells, stuffed alligators, coral necklaces, seahorses,
sea fans and mounted butterflies. A graduate of Agnes Scott College with a bachelor's
degree in English, she earned a master's degree from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
In addition to poetry, she loves stars, shells, fossils and playing the Steinway
that her father gave her in 1948.
$14.00, 104 pages, ISBN: 0-9700980-2-2
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