Color is the Suffering of Light - Hardcover

Green, M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393036502 ISBN 13: 9780393036503

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995

Synopsis

Set on a Massachusetts farm in the 1960s, this memoir about the author's childhood, and the legacy of three generations of her family, is a vivid portrait of a young girl searching for meaning and beauty in a world where mother love - so fierce that it becomes pathological - cripples those whom it would nurture; where real and spiritual poverty, alcoholism, and despair pit themselves against the imaginative life; where nature and language become a creative child's only allies. Of her family, award-winning poet Melissa Green writes: "I looked down at the old photograph and into the proud, angry, hurt, scheming, unforgiving, tender faces of the Greens. Their family was just like ours. Then I thought: it is ours. How did love get so mixed up with hatred? How did kindness turn to bitterness? Why was envy, resentment, fury, unhappiness, blame, and the deeply felt belief that life had cheated them, that they deserved better, at the heart of everything they said? Their blood was in mine. Their sadness and defeat and defiance ran through my veins until they joined like rivers at my heart." Alive with the feeling and color that distinguish its author's widely praised poems, this book richly evokes the process by which certain memories burn themselves indelibly into our minds, changing forever who we are.

About this title

Synopsis

An acclaimed poet's memoir is a portrait of a young girl searching for meaning and beauty in a world of suffocating mother love, spiritual and physical poverty, alcoholism, and despair--with nature and the English language as her only allies.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393036502
• ISBN 13: 9780393036503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 341