Book description
Combining the best of poetry, nature writing, a biography, Pamela
Alexander in her book-length "persona poem" brings to life
John James Audubon and a world not yet aware of nature's limits. She
distills the essence of this remarkable naturalistic-artist and gives
him voice to tell his life story in fragments and letters, journal
entries, actual vignettes, and lyrical passages. Captivating, and
accessible, her poem reads with the authority of autobiography, the
dramatic coherence of a novel, and the evocative clarity of an Audubon
print. The reader, briefly transported to the natural world of America a
century and a half ago, cannot help but contrast its condition today and
feel a poignant sense of loss. "Employs the fiction writer's
narrative strategies, the poet's music, and the autobiographer's
intimacy . . . a linguistically inventive and emotionally compelling
portrait"--Robin Becker, Prairie Schooner PAMELA ALEXANDER won
the Yale Younger Poet award in 1984 for Navigable Waterways (1985) and
has published poems in the New Yorker and Atlantic. After writing short
persona poems on Amelia Earhardt and Howard Hughes, she says, "I
had an urge to write longer poems about unusual people." Her
interest in Audubon dates in part from childhood, when her mother, a
veteran birder, "talked to me about ecology decades before the word
was commonly used." She currently teaches in the Writing Program at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
