Liane Strauss

Biographical note:  Liane Strauss is an American poet and the author of Frankie, Alfredo, (Donut Press, 2009). Her poems are also included in the pamphlets Ask for It by Name (2008) and The Like Of It (2005), on the CD Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam, and in many magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. She is among the guest poets on www.clivejames.com and teaches literature and creative writing at The City Lit, The Poetry School and Birkbeck College. She lives in North London with her two sons.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714469
ISBN:  9781844714469
Author:  Liane Strauss
Title:  Leaving Eden
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-10
Extent:  96pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The mind in love is an Eden, and a labyrinth; a return to innocence, and a serpent that seduces itself. This book of twenty-first century love poems follows the intricate, often-bewildering ways of the mind in love and pursues its themes, like Ariadne’s thread, through a maze of voices that range from that of a young Salome confronting her first loss to that of an eleventh-century Japanese courtesan as her grip on her emotions begins to unravel.

Main description:  The mind in love is an Eden, and a labyrinth; a return to innocence, and a serpent that seduces itself. Like a walled garden in the modern city, the mind under love’s power is a paradise that flourishes and delights in the shadow of a fallen world.

This book of twenty-first century love poems follows the intricate, often-bewildering ways of the mind in love and pursues its themes, like Ariadne’s thread, through a maze of voices.The beings who populate Leaving Eden are a surprising and familiar combination of sophisticated and artless. They are worldly but not cynical, guileless without being callow, at once rueful and unblinking, fearless and trusting.

The beings who populate Leaving Eden are a surprising and familiar combination of sophisticated and artless. They are worldly but not cynical, guileless without being callow, at once rueful and unblinking, fearless and trusting. Displaying a wit that is not above flirting with heat, and a self-awareness liable to slip into self-abandon, these characters seem to awaken into their dramas like dreamers, as if to demonstrate that we don’t lose our innocence once and for all, but over and over again, and as if to prove that not only is every state of innocence followed by a fall, it also emerged from one.

Like us, the characters in these poems know better and nevertheless let themselves be beguiled again and again. Like us, they are skeptical, and like us, they fall — apart, flat, from grace, sometimes with grace, in and out of love, into and through the words and worlds love conjures — again and again, as the mind, over and over, seeks to find its way out of, and back into, that best image of itself: love’s Eden.

Table of contents:
Seduction
Round Trip
Rumour
The Future Scene
Cut and a Blow Dry
Boy
The Speed of the World
Pointless
Variations on a Theme by Lady Suw?
Cliché
The Yellow Dress
Hymn
The Little Death
Alone in the Night
Three Ostriches
A Baroque Birdcage Seller
in the Seventh District of Vienna
The Piano Tuner
Ceci n’est pas
Winter
The morning is the hardest. It is morning
Cross Country
The Museum of Desires
The Seamless Future
The Accordion Player
Land’s End
Leaving Eden
Torture Garden
Nature Morte
The Clear Thread
Poppies
Glass Bottom Car
A Sprig in a Cold Snap
True Love
The Affair
The Dog and Duck
Proof
The Same Dream
Here’s Looking at You
Your Clouds
The Catastrophe of the Old Comedy
It’s Never Too Early for a Clean Slate
Frankie, Alfredo,
Self-Portrait as Myself
Transcriptions of Éluard
Poetry Lover
Now Blue, Now Green
Jigsaw World
Ditchdigger
Hooks and Buttons
Archimedes and Me
Le Mot Juste
Dedication

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Excerpt from book:  

Boy

Years before, the infant Salome had a favourite
she called Boy. He was always there, wrist-first,
heel-first, a hatless lassoed cowboy
dragged through girlhood’s surface-of-the-moon
terrain, kissing the cliff-face of her bed, his mouth
around her hair, and, knowing he was hers,
belonged exclusively to her, she loved him.

Love was not enough or she would never have lost
Boy, naked, nameless, stupid and alone, beneath
a Waldbaum’s sky coffered in coffee-stained
acoustic tile and hyperlit like human skin under
the microscope of teenage lust, under the shadow
of the precipice down which, split and paired
and glistening exactly like the sometime necks
of smallish animals or great big birds, molten
pomegranate rivers ran.

Back home she turned merciless. She snapped
the head off every last doll she possessed
and heaped the headless bodies on her bed.
She wept longer than anyone ever wept
and every night she dreamed of Boy,
only of him, his moulded-plastic head
mouldering in the dust of crates and cabbage leaves.

This, to satisfy those for whom cause and explanation,
and not the simple disposition of parts, is paramount.

Review quote:  Liane Strauss can drive a standard romantic line straight at the wall of cliche and spin the wheel at the last moment ("The nothings you whispered were not sweet") so that the whole idea turns into a memorable night out, with a picnic on the canal bank at dawn as the car finishes sinking out of sight. But she has no chance of turning off the glamour that her hurtling forms generate…. Her work is helping to provide the dazzling evidence that there is a new school of poets in London for whom the Atlantic has simply disappeared.

Clive James
www.clivejames.com

Review quote:  The most characteristic mark of a Strauss poem is its rhetorical authority. Strauss writes as if she's confidently mapping the secret grammar and physics of the universe. She has a fine ear for cadence, rhythm and rhyme — half, quarter, eighth…. nano? — and she can certainly pull off the tight, concise, exquisitely crafted thing, though she usually prefers to give her poems a freer rein and let them build up their characteristic dizzying momentum, as in the present selection.

Liane Strauss writes fresh, compelling, edgy, intelligent poetry and I'm delighted to play a part in introducing it to a wider audience.

Michael Donaghy
The Limelight, 2003