Research Catalog

Title

The Ishtar Gate : last and selected poems / Diana Brebner ; edited and with an introduction by Stephanie Bolster.

Author

Brebner, Diana, 1956-

Publication

Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Bolster, Stephanie.

Description

xvi, 166 p.; 19 cm.

Summary

"Cancer claimed Diana Brebner's life before she could complete her last collection. The finished poems are gathered here for the first time, together with selections from her award-winning Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna. Elemental, elegant, and passionate, Brebner's last poems claim as their symbol the Ishtar Gate: a threshold between the past and the future, the old world and the new. Through this Babylonian gate we see a canoe on a northern lake, a scene from Vermeer, a line by Sylvia Plath, a Polaroid of a heart, a jar of orange marmalade, a frozen Aphrodite."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

Hugh MacLennan poetry series ; 15

Note

• Includes poems previously published in Radiant life forms, The golden lotus and Flora & fauna.

Contents

Considered passion : the poetry of Diana Brebner -- Snow angels -- Immolation -- The children in that country -- Awake in the morning room, newly painted -- You, of all white women I have loved -- Radiant life forms -- The sparrow drawer -- What is homeless in me, and sightless -- Desire, mother and child -- The radiant lady poems -- Open among the lilies -- The golden lotus -- Karuna -- Head of a girl -- The perfect garden -- Eleven paintings by Mary Pratt -- Flora & fauna -- The black swan -- Poison dart frogs -- The green canoe -- Facing Buddha -- Prints of love -- Pictures of an eclipse -- Polycarbon butterfly unfurled -- The pictures of my heart -- At the Schwarzschild radius -- The blue light of the neutron pool -- The trout -- My hope -- Porthole -- Port -- For the poet who told me to think less and feel more -- Frozen -- Waiting -- Morning on the guitar -- The bridge -- Detonation/notation -- Variation on John Thompson's Ghazal XXXVIII -- The narrow lens -- Venus velvet 6557 HB -- The variable swans -- Listening to Winterreise -- A stranger -- The Isis rattle -- Access the calm serene -- Concern for my soul -- Karma's girls -- Servant of the muse -- Gaia reclining -- Our Kate -- Orange marmalade Keiller recipe -- Slicing oranges in Kim's kitchen -- Blood oranges -- Silence -- Silence II -- The nature of weapons -- That blue is all in a rush -- The trout in the well : ideas on order & poetry.

ISBN

0773528350 (pbk.) :

OCLC

ocm56531479

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries