For two decades, Vivian Shipley has quietly established a reputation as a master storyteller in verse. From the terse, lyric portraits of the Kentucky hills in her early work to the more expansive narratives of family life past and present in her more recent work, Shipley has told her tales memorably. Now, in When There Is No Shore--her first full-length collection to win a major national competition, the Word Press Poetry Prize--Shipley establishes herself as a major poet of her generation. Ranging across a variety of subjects, her new poems engage in the common mission of delving deeply beneath the surface and trying to navigate a world with no landscapes, no shore, as a guide.
"Vivian Shipley's poetry is distinguished by how much of life and life's joyous energy it manages to convey. Alternately exhilarating and tender, her voice is expansive, inclusive and arresting. Ranging from Appalachian Kentucky to Soviet Russia, she does not merely capture the memorable particulars of the landscape, but always finds a genuine human story to tell." --Dana Gioia
"The pantheon you meet in these vivid narrative poems covers an astonishing range from Buster Keaton to Charlotte Mew; from the poet's Hardin County farmer-father to Joseph Brodsky; from Vasyl Stus, a prisoner in Perm 36, to Martha Stewart. These intelligent, densely packed poems should be read slowly, the way you savor a good sherry."--Maxine Kumin
Vivian Shipley, editor of Connecticut Review, is the Connecticut State
University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation
Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner
Society, the Thin Air Magazine Poetry Prize from Northern Arizona University
and was named Faculty Scholar at Southern Connecticut State University where
she teaches creative writing. She has published nine books of poetry including
How Many Stones?, winner of the Devil's Millhopper Contest (University
of South Carolina-Aiken, 1998), Crazy Quilt, a 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize
Finalist (Hanover Press, 1999), Fair Haven (Negative Capability Press,
2000), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Echo and Anger, Still
(Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2000) and Down of Hawk (Sow's
Ear Press, 2001).
$15.00, 100 pages, ISBN: 0-9708667-4-7
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