In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
Merely link your tool computer system or gizmo to the internet hooking up. Obtain the modern innovation making your downloading and install In The Home Of The Famous Dead: Collected Poems, By Jo McDougall finished. Even you do not wish to review, you could straight close the book soft documents and also open In The Home Of The Famous Dead: Collected Poems, By Jo McDougall it later. You could additionally easily obtain the book almost everywhere, because In The Home Of The Famous Dead: Collected Poems, By Jo McDougall it is in your gizmo. Or when remaining in the workplace, this In The Home Of The Famous Dead: Collected Poems, By Jo McDougall is additionally recommended to review in your computer system tool.
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
Ebook PDF In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
In the Home of the Famous Dead will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall’s long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet’s signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall’s world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, “the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.” Her work has been described as having “excruciating honesty” (Gerald Stern), giving voice to the “ineffable emotions of plain people” (Judith Kitchen). Miller Williams notes that the work has “cleanness and clarity . . . in all the funk and smell of humanity.” This is the poetry of midwestern plains and southern botttomlands, of waitresses and professors, farmers and bankers, the disadvantaged and privileged alike. Often beginning in the personal and expanding to the universal, this poet takes note of the phenomenological world with a mixture of joy, despair, and awe, providing a haunting look at the cosmic irony of our existence. McDougall’s style is indescribable, yet wholly accessible. As Kelly Cherry notes, “Call it magic, call it art; either way [Jo McDougall’s work] is something like a miracle.”
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall - Amazon Sales Rank: #900796 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-15
- Released on: 2015-06-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall Review “In In the Home of the Famous Dead, we note Jo McDougall’s alignment with storytellers, with her ear for dialect and a heart for the cadences and tics of human behavior. She lives in a family tracing back in our literature through Eudora Welty, Robert Frost, and Mark Twain. This collection is a box of jewels, each polished to its own shine. Here even a button or a “cracked comb” can signify the weight of a whole life, its loves, its crazy amusements, its resident grief. McDougall writes poetry as if language has meaning. It’s her gift, brilliant, humane, mournful, and wise. ‘Here is a book,’ as she writes, ‘with all the letters of our names.’” —David Baker
“In the Home of the Famous Dead proves Jo McDougall the reigning virtuoso of the small lyric in English, able to capture deep human emotion and knowledge in very few words. Here’s “Visiting My Daughter”: “For weeks / I visited every day, / drawn to that fresh rise, / the blister of her grave.” The poem seems intent on delivering a happy ending but then death comes. The story of all our lives. Again and again, throughout these twenty-seven years of poems, McDougall delivers unsentimental truths in exceedingly well-written poems like jewels or small clockworks. Brava, Jo. Read this book friends.”
—North American Review, Summer 2015
“Masterful carvings of narrative imagery…. There isn’t another poet writing today who produces this combination of narrative depth, imagistic punch, and compressed language.”
—New Letters, Vol. 82 No. 1
About the Author Jo McDougall lives in Little Rock. She is the author of five books of poetry and the memoir Daddy’s Money.
Where to Download In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. It’s easy to understand why Jo McDougall has such a strong ... By Maryfrances It’s easy to understand why Jo McDougall has such a strong following. She joins that list of southern wonders who deliver life so clearly through small, apt details. Her poems are accessible, peer in on everyday life, and often deliver startling zinger lines that linger. In only a few spare words, she leaves a lasting impression, and through her eye for detail, she captures a sensory moment exactly spot on with such lines as, “The night felt like fine porcelain/ left standing in cool windows,” “Under the eaves the night birds/ rustle like taffeta,” “their bodies glimmer like dolphins in moonlight,” “She enters like smoke, /like sunlight through a cat’s ear,” “This is sometimes how grace comes to us, /sharp and fleeting as a paper cut,” or “the wife slams the door, startling two pictures on the wall.” Her specifics pull the readers into their own personal experiences, and it’s easy for them to make their own connections since McDougall writes of moments indicative of most lives: marriage, love, death, loss, intrigue, gossip. When her mother is dying, she says, “Before the doctor says what he has to say/ we believe she is merely distant, that we can reach to pull her back/ the way as children we waded to our small boat/anchored in the shallows, /rocking and waiting for us.” McDougall also experiences losing her daughter, and those poems are as moving as any in the collection. In “Telling Time” she says: My son and I walk away from his sister’s day-old-grave. Our backs to the sun, the forward pitch of our shadows tells us the time. By sweetest accident he inclines his shadow, touching mine. Certainly, her poems are not all sad. Irony, humor, and wisdom radiate through many of her poems as she portrays the lives of ordinary people indicative of the Midwest and South. Whether through the gossip of small town minds or personal observation of waitresses, farmers, or neighbors, McDougall looks in on small-town life in a way similar to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. We become privy to a few people’s dark secrets along with what they bear through life. Even though McDougall portrays the plains of Kansas to the farms of Arkansas to the Louisiana bayou , her poems from seven collections sparkle with her southern roots from growing up in the Arkansas delta where “the kitchen smelled like a churn, guineas and chickens strutted the porch,” and “Indian summer [brittled] the fields” or where a mother looked at her son “as though he might have been the Perkins boy/ come to paint the shed,” and a husband “withers like the wheat./ He’s been in town since yesterday, drinking down the smell of dead cows.” Her poems become condensed stories reflective of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Conner. This compelling collection offers poems readers will come back to again and again.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. No One Says So Much in So Few Words By Alarie Tennille If poets were chefs, Jo McDougall would be a five-star saucier, renowned for the fine art of sauce reduction. Let it simmer and evaporate half or two-thirds of what you had to start. All you’re losing is tasteless water. The resulting sauce, or poem, will have ten times the flavor. Brevity is the soul of Mcdougall’s wit, mystery, and power.Although most of her poems cover less than half a page, she somehow manages to capture the tone of a rambling Southern storyteller. You might think of O’Connor, Welty, or Faulkner. She can make you feel you just read an entire novel or have known some character his whole life in just twelve lines. She knows how to make us fill in our own details.McDougall writes mainly of daily life among farmers and small town people in the South and Midwest. You’ll feel at home with them, yet even scenes that feel familiar hold a surprise: some wink or twist or an occasional leap into the magical. We meet a man who moves into his parakeet’s cage after his wife walks out; in another poem, we learn how to become invisible. First you catch a toad and cover it with a flower pot atop an ant hill on a grave, and that’s the easy part.Many poems are heart-breaking, especially since her 2001 book, Dirt, is about her daughter’s cancer diagnosis, treatment, and death, then the grief that continues. Yet Jo knows that loss is an inescapable part of life and that joy begins returning on short visits. In “Mammogram,” after the doctor says the spots on the x-ray are benign, she writes, “I suddenly love/the radiologist, the nurse, the paper gown, the vapid print on the dressing roomwall.”One of the most touching poems for me is “Weight.” She doesn’t bother to say she feels this way because she’s enjoying a rare moment of normalcy after her daughter’s death. We understand that from the rest of the book. They’re in the bleachers at a Pee Wee game when her husband leaves to get a Coke. “When he returns,/the plank sags slightly/with his weight. I want to sing.”McDougall’s poems end with a slam of the door that, instead of catching, bounces open for us to run after her words. “Farm Wife” ends by telling us the husband has “been in town since yesterday,/drinking down the smell of dead cows.” In “The Order of Things,” we easily mistake it to be a sweet moment when she tells “a grandchild young enough to care about it” that she “discovered a chipmunk…in a nearby field.” What a difference that last line makes: “Then I told him about the hawk.”Most of McDougall’s poems are small enough for you to slip into a pocket and share, and you’ll want to do that. As Alice Friman says, “No one writes like this, no one.”
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A Masterpiece of a collection. By Thomas Lavoie The poetry of Jo McDougall is a treasure that readers can now experience in this amazing Collected Poems. Hers is a Southern poetry and a Midwest poetry. It deals with the land and the people. It tells their stories in short, carefully crafted, subtle poems filled with gorgeous imagery. They strike out at a reader like lightning, first grabbing their attention, then their awe and amazement. These poems explore many dark places but there is much humor as well. Mainly, though, they reveal a full world to us in the slightest of brush strokes, capturing moments that flutter by like a moth. Don't blink or you'll miss it. Here goes one now--Living without them, she takes solacein hedges or in weeds.Some nights,alone in the house,she lies face down on the wood floor. ("A Southerner in Kansas Recalls Tress")
See all 7 customer reviews...
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall PDF
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall iBooks
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall ePub
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall rtf
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall AZW
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall Kindle
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, by Jo McDougall
