Hurricane Walk Poems [Paperback]

DIANN BLAKELY (1957–2014) was a former poetry editor at the Antioch Review and New World Writing. Blakely was also the author of Cities of Flesh and the Dead, which won Elixir Press’s seventh annual publication prize after being distinguished by the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, given for a year’s best manuscript-in-progress.

Hurricane Walk is Diann Blakely’s first volume of poetry. Originally published in 1992, it was named one of the ten best verse collections published that year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With this collection, Blakely artfully mines the empathic center of each poem, fearlessly crafting an achingly personal portrait of contemporary life and family that is both sweet and razor sharp.

"What poetry does best and perhaps does most plaintively," Blakely has said, "is to remind us of the absences and losses of the world we currently suffer and revel in. It is very much the language of intimacy. And this is what her work achieves at its best. Blakley wrings a refined sense of intimacy from her carefully crafted verses, revealing the fragile essence of the female experience and, moreover, of the human condition.

Blakely plunges you right into the emotional heart of each poem, mincing no words as she creates an extraordinary picture of contemporary life.Blakely is most sure-footed when she animates the inanimate or gives voice to beings other than herself, as in ‘Witch,’ ‘Gauguin in Alaska,’ and ‘The Gold Bird,’ continuing the idea introduced in ‘For My Mother’ that artifice can be superior to the messiness of life: ‘it is my song that trembles gold leaves,’ the caged bird tells us in its proud isolation.Originally published in 1992, this is Diann Blakely's first volume of poetry. With tlÃ-