Research Catalog

Title

The humming birds / Lucinda Roy.

Author

Roy, Lucinda.

Publication

Portland, Or. : Eighth Mountain Press, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

88 pages; 23 cm

Summary

• Lucinda Roy makes a living, breathing reality of women's history. Her poems compel us into the world she envisions, whether through the eyes of a slave or the eyes of a contemporary woman remembering Africa, remembering her dead mother, remembering nights of passionate love. And in the end the poems reveal how all these worlds are inevitably connected - how the slave, Lucy, still walks down the grand staircase of the plantation mansion, and how the poet's mother is still close by, waiting to be found.
• The work combines a seemingly effortless craft with an attention to detail that expands into unusual insights about the larger world. The poet excels at finding the uniquely personal image; even the tortoise, Albert, who was bombed during the London Blitz, becomes a potent symbol. "All I can offer now is resistance/to created myth, and sign, and metaphor," she says. Indeed, her poems, beautiful as they are, go far beyond metaphor to grapple with the very substance of life.

Subject

• Women > Poetry

Note

• "Winner of the Eighth Mountain poetry prize"--Cover.

Contents

Yellow Bird -- Needlework -- Origami -- The Votaries -- The Curse -- The Curtsy -- The Humming Birds -- The Archangel Michael -- Book Review -- Suffering the Sea Change: All My Pretty Ones -- Suffering the Sea Change: Not Venus, But Rising -- The Man Who Played the Trumpet -- The Virginia Reel -- In Extremis -- Cancer -- Sierra Leone -- Penultimate Rites -- Stained Glass -- Flying Buttresses -- Surfacing -- For My Son -- Making Love -- Sexuality -- Talking to a Writer -- Sustenance -- Untitled -- Triple Overtime -- Divorce: The Old Sestina -- The Ride -- The Key -- Iris -- The Need for Skin -- The Heretic -- Caracole -- Famine -- The Bread Man -- Genesis -- The Photograph -- What Is Dangerous Not to Remember -- Cat's Cradle, Hopscotch, and Jumprope -- Women in Form -- Birth Control -- Custodian -- The Word Was With Gods -- On Seeing Things -- Gospel.

ISBN

0933377398 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

95038457

OCLC

• 33047096
• ocm33047096

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries