Mary Leader: Beyond the Fire
Published 15 September 2010
Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781848611221
The work in Mary Leader's third collection, Beyond the Fire, does not conform to any one habitation, nor aesthetic persuasion, nor name. On the contrary, just about every poem invents its own territory and its own terms. Some poems are straightforward narratives, while others repeat spells and castings. Many are figural; some are classical; some even aspire to anonymity. The book is designed to range the globe and fathom the centuries, albeit, in the end, the poet's settlement is but a momentary locality. Yet, if the beings who dwell in this book did have an infinitive, it would be "to survive."
Download a PDF sampler from this book.
Comments on the author's previous collections:
"Leader has more ideas than she knows what to do with. And each of her poems offers something new: together they adumbrate an enticing and insistently personal way of looking—both at the sights the world offers, and at the people with whom she hopes to share them."—Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
"Clearly, this is a poet acquainted with the ecstatic, and at the book's best, it is this musicality and emotional vulnerability that make the poems work." —Arielle Greenberg, Rain Taxi
"Leader artfully articulates one woman’s struggle to unite intellect
and emotion."
—Michael
Hainey, The New York Times Book Review
"These poems resemble pieces of fine prairie architecture: they’re eclectic, practical, and capable of large vernacular gestures, and they do an odd, upright justice to the infinite faintly undulating landscape stretching away around them. Leader owes some of her intimacy with the American sublime to Dr. Williams but much more of it to her own quite remarkable sensibility, which is one of the most self-possessed in contemporary poetry." —The New Yorker
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