Becoming
Bone
Poems on the Life of Celia Thaxter (1836–1894)
Annie
Boutelle
Delves
into the life of a nineteenth-century woman poet
In
the long tradition of biography-in-poetry collections, Annie
Boutelle’s first collection probes the layered life
of one of nineteenth-century America’s most popular
poets, who is now almost forgotten. The Celia Thaxter who
speaks these poems disturbs the placid myth created around
her public persona, and focuses on the fierce mysteries
and ironies that frame her. Boutelle carefully reveals Thaxter’s
childhood on the stark Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire
coast; the trap of a Victorian marriage; the struggle to
invent herself as writer and painter; her celebrated circle
of friends, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Childe Hassam;
and the hard-won serenity of her last decade. Clear, airy,
crystalline, these poems move us into an elemental world
where “nothing is left but water, / air, and the uncertain
space between.” With restraint and lyric tenderness,
Boutelle leads us toward a woman who shifts from pose to
necessary pose, who survives in these pages with intelligence
and grace: “The grave / flesh melts. What’s
left / is light as bone.”
“In
a language spare, exact, essential as necessity itself,
‘past flattering chatter, hypocrisies lush as weed
on harbor rock,’ Annie Boutelle tears aside the flowery
veils of feminine concealment of another age, to give voice
to the inner life of an islanded soul.”
—Eleanor
Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair and
Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems
“This
is a magnificent secret history—of a time we now know
very little, in spite of its closeness, and of a remarkable
spirit who lived in that time and is now forgotten. The
poems are stark, original, lovely, the poetic knowledge
terrific. Read this fine book.”
—Gerald
Stern, author of Everything is Burning and
American Sonnets
“The
sorrows and victories of Thaxter’s life are conveyed
with
sensual, sonorous richness and yet understatement. If much
of her inner life—like that of so many women (some
of them writers)—went unwritten for a time, Becoming
Bone has redressed the blankness with empathy, depth,
and a keen intelligence.”
—Mary
Jo Salter, author of Open Shutters: Poems and
A Kiss in Space: Poems
Annie
Boutelle
is a senior lecturer at Smith College, where she founded
the Poetry Center. She was a finalist for the 1999 Walt
Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000
Kathryn Morton Award, and the 2002 Philip Levine Prize.
Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and magazines.
She is the author of a forthcoming poetry collection, Nest
of Thistles, and lives in Florence, Massachusetts.
July
94 pages
5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
$16.95 (s) Paper
978-1-55728-797-7 | 1-55728-797-X
