In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety.| Contents I. God's Ode To Creation Nineteenth Century Animals Translating Dead Moth in a Bottle of Mineral Water Food Shows Stare-e-o Vision Postcards At the Vet's Practicing T'ai Chi Ch'uan A Description of Our Morning Pride and Prejudice: The Game Through the Dark God's Ode to Creation II. Lost And Found Lost and Found Ode to Pokeweed Milk of Human Kindness The Gilles Dear Listener, Dear Reader Tatyana Twenty Questions Poem on a Forbidden Subject A Night in Assisi Psalm for a Lost Summer Vacations in America III. The Tale Of Hermann Goertz The Tale of Herman Goertz IV. Cimetiere Virtual Oleander Cloud Letter to the Old Magician Elegy for Olive Abstract Art Cocktail Glasses Meditation While Cooking Soup Beginning Poetry Writing, 1968 Greed Dream Kitchen Little Sonata for Early November Cimeti¿re Virtual Immortal Sofa | "Maura Stanton presents us with a world of abundance and careful discrimination, a world that deserves the same king of assiduous attention that has gone into making these poems."—Prairie Schooner
|Maura Stanton is a professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University. She has published five books of poetry, including Snow on Snow and Glacier Wine, as well as a novel and three collections of short stories. Her poems and stories have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune, The Antioch Review, and The New Yorker.