Earth Days: Poems, Chants, & Spells in Five Directions

Description

Annie Finch’s spellbinding poems give voice to the earth-centered spirituality of our era.  Finch is a renowned poetry witch who skillfully draws on the secrets of poetic rhythm and craft to honor the sacredness of the natural world. Earth Days gathers her poems over five decades around the elements of fire (flame, sun, stars, heat, passion); air (moon, wind, light, wisdom); earth (mud, roots, mountain, tree, strength); water (ocean, river, rain, tears, heart); and matrix (intuition, mystery, ritual, spirit). Finch’s poems enchant the ear as well as the mind, combining her virtuosic use of poetic craft with a rhapsodic, transformative, and feminist postmodern sensibility.

Dense and musically alive, this is poetry meant to be read aloud. This is the first collection of Finch’s poetry to be published outside of the U.S and gathers Finch’s most cherished poems along with previously uncollected new poems. Poems included in the book have appeared in leading periodicals including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Yale Review.

Annie Finch’s poetry is a pure tone that calls us home to the first impulse of poetry. We link to mystery. We lift off.

—Joy Harjo

Like an Olympic ice skater, Annie Finch makes intricate music look smooth and easy. . .I recommend her with enthusiasm—and awe.

—Molly Peacock, President Emerita, Poetry Society of America

“I can state, with absolutely no doubt whatsoever, that Annie Finch taught me to discover the music in my own body.  I have never encountered again someone so unflinchingly passionate about the art of poetry and so dedicated to its potential.

—Patricia Smith, National Poetry Award Winner

Annie Finch’s poems are at once a continuation and a critique of the plural traditions from which they are drawn, a commentary on the seductive and treacherous—and redemptive—qualities of language itself.

—Marilyn Hacker

Annie Finch’s poetry emboldens the spirit and enlightens the soul, offering the listener a journey like no other.

—Jeffrey Cantrell

“In words that soar but are never obscure, Annie Finch tells of Goddesses who have returned offering threads of meaning with which to weave our lives anew. Sing to us, dear Muse.”

—Carol P. Christ, author of Rebirth of the Goddess

An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is. Finch, at the forefront of the re-evaluation of traditional form in poetry, uses poetic structures to distract monkey mind so that wild mind sings through. . . she finds rhyme and meter rooted in the oral tradition with its pagan proletarian values. She takes back the master’s tools by remembering that they were, from the first, tools of the common folk.

—Patricia Monaghan, author of The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Annie Finch understands better than any contemporary I know what poetry feels like and sounds like when it is completely at home in its traditions. . .  ..   She is a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego.

—Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

Annie Finch is an American original, a master of control who shows no fear of excess, and none of quietness either. . . The directness and simplicity of her poems are deceptive –they have depths and delights that appear to go on forever.

—Ron Silliman

Finch is a poet in her bones . . .again and again, I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea, and sound spun out in a perfect braid.

—C.L. Rawlins

Gnomic, intricate, lyrical, and deft, Finch’s poetry brings Dickinson’s to mind. . .  a poetry that technically precise, that risky and spectacular.

—C. G. MacDonald, San Francisco Poetry Flash

Annie Finch has made form a one-eyed woman looking out at us all, beckoning us to enter into her arena and be.

—Sonia Sanchez

The brightest liveliest most gifted person of her generation . . . Whenever I get discouraged about some trends in American poetry, I think of Annie Finch, a shining light, and I feel better.

—Carolyn Kizer

Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, translator, and speaker known for her incantatory poetry, composed to be read aloud. She is the author of six books of poetry including Spells: New and Selected Poems, Eve, and Calendars (both finalists for the National Poetry Series), and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (awarded the Sarasvati Award). She has also published numerous books about poetry including A Poet’s Craft, The Ghost of Meter, The Body of Poetry, and nine anthologies on poetics including A Formal Feeling Comes, Villanelles, An Exaltation of Forms, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters.  Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and Norton Anthology of World Literature and has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. In 2012 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the Art and Craft of Versification. Finch’s verse plays and Poetry Witch Theater rituals have been produced at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Deepak Chopra Homespace, and American Opera Projects. Educated at Yale University and Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D, she has performed her poems cross the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe.