Old and New Testaments (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) - Hardcover

Powell, Lynn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299149005 ISBN 13: 9780299149000

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Synopsis

These poems explore the author's Southern Baptist upbringing and how that history echoes through her adult experiences of sexual love, self-knowledge, loss and motherhood. Her ""testament"" is that of a life, a family and a world.

About this title

Review:

"Lynn Powell's "Old & New Testaments" is a reclaiming of spiritual texts and traditions for a woman's life in the body a life of childhood physicality, female sexuality, procreation, and nurturing love. Playful, tender, and wise, Powell brings her gospel learning down to earth. We can hail her poems in an old phrase with a new meaning: they are full of grace." Alicia Ostriker" "In Lynn Powell's poems we rediscover the meaning of the word 'testament, ' for they give us a full testimony of a life, a family, a world. Whether writing of grief, or the Rapture, of a junebug or Aunt Roxy at the age of one hundred, she brings us intense, crafted narratives of self-knowledge, of facts so vivid they are painful, becoming signs and also wonders of life. These are poems of the recovery of spiritual desire. This is an extraordinary book, and an extraordinary new talent."--Robert Morgan "Lynn Powell's Old & New Testaments is a reclaiming of spiritual texts and traditions for a woman's life in the body--a life of childhood physicality, female sexuality, procreation, and nurturing love. Playful, tender, and wise, Powell brings her gospel learning down to earth. We can hail her poems in an old phrase with a new meaning: they are full of grace."--Alicia Ostriker "These direct, loving, sober poems are the change we need from most recent verse. The intensity of the opening poems in Old & New Testaments builds throughout the book until, almost intolerable, it transforms into profound acceptance, the quietness that comes of acknowledging both life and death. These images and rhythms need no persuasiveness beyond themselves, brightening our spirits with the clarity of reality."--A. R. Ammons "A radiance and clarity suffuses Lynn Powell's work."--Carolyn Kizer, Brittingham Prize Citation

About the Author:

Lynn Powell was raised in East Tennessee and educated at Carson-Newman College and Cornell University. She has worked extensively as a writer in the schools for the Tennessee Arts Commission, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and currently, the Ohio Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0299149005
• ISBN 13: 9780299149000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 82