The Eternal City Poems [Paperback]

Chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to relaunch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship,The Eternal Cityrevives Princeton's tradition of publishing some of todays best poetry.

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists,The Eternal Cityoffers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Grabers collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.
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FromThe Eternal City:
WHAT I MEANT TO SAY
Kathleen Graber?

In three weeks I will be gone. Already my suitcase stands
overloaded at the door. Ive packed, unpacked, & repacked it,
making it tell me again & again what it couldnt hold.
Some days its easy to see the signifi cant insignificance
of everything, but today I wept all morning over the swollen,
optimistic heart of my mothers favorite newscaster,
which suddenly blew itself to stillness. I have tried for weeks
to predict the weather on the other side of the world: I dont want
to be wet or overheated. Ive taken outThe Complete Shakespeare
to make room for a slicker. And Ive changed my mind
& put it back. Soon no one will know what I mean when I speak.
Last month, after graduation, a student stopped me just outside
the University gates despite a downpour. He wanted to tell me
that he loved best James Schuylers poem for Auden.
So much to remember, he recilS/