Engraved
by Anna George Meek
$10.95
“…offers a quietly riveting mix of the observed and the observer. Pictorial images from the dictionary, rendered in words as sharp as the engraver’s knife, are amplified by a mind’s sinuous leaps into their names, connotations, and essences … I am taken by these readings of the material world because they are (sparingly) complicated by the poet’s own preoccupations.” —Ellen Doré Watson, final judge, 2011 Snowbound Chapbook Award
Format: paperback
Out of stock
Inspired by nineteenth-century engravings for the Webster’s Dictionary, Engraved explores a fantastic land at the edge of obsolescence and loss. The poems teem with whaling schooners, passenger pigeons, a bayonet, cupola furnace, clavichord—words and objects at the brink of extinction, placed in and around the death of the poet’s father. But these poems also create, or recreate; through illustration, music, and myth, the imagination here allows the dead to reappear, mostly, and sometimes also lets them go. Located at the intersection of art and grief, these poems honor anyone who has set down lines and vanished from the earth.
“Engraved offers a quietly riveting mix of the observed and the observer. Pictorial images from the dictionary, rendered in words as sharp as the engraver’s knife, are amplified by a mind’s sinuous leaps into their names, connotations, and essences. Meditation erupts into delight or urgency, humor or declaration … I am taken by these readings of the material world because they are (sparingly) complicated by the poet’s own preoccupations. Commentary points beyond the literal to the fear inherent in the very project of the imagination: ‘Creatures / come by night and break the skin / of my heart as if piercing fruit.’” —Ellen Doré Watson, final judge, 2011 Snowbound Chapbook Award
Anna George Meek has published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Seneca Review, The Missouri Review (where she was awarded the Tom McAfee Discovery Prize), Water~Stone, Crazyhorse, and dozens of other national journals. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, two Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships, and an Academy of American Poetry Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Poetry Series (three times), the Minnesota Book Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her first book, Acts of Contortion, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; her chapbook Engraved won the 2011 Snowbound Chapbook Competition from Tupelo Press. Meek lives with her husband and daughter in Minneapolis, where she sings professionally with the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and is a professor of English.
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
Segment of a Circle
Like a Cheshire cat, the circle does not
show itself, save for this one
raised eyebrow. O circle,
we imagine thee. Centuries
are round, and they disappear
beyond the curve of the earth.
The engraver is long dead; even I
am only partially visible. Believer
or skeptic, I can only have faith
that the moon appears behind me
when I turn away, can only
dream of its light, the universe, and
all gibbous time, shining entire.
