Poetry
Published books of poetry written by Rosanna Warren.
So forth, W. W. Norton, 2020.
With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, one of our most extraordinary poets blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems in So Forth surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural; identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae, with formidable women artists of the past in the powerful sequence “Legende of Good Women,” with pre-Socratic philosophers, and with lovers, children, and strangers—the strangest of whom is the face in the mirror. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and traditions of the sacred.
“The enrichments and diminishments of aging, ambivalence in the context of intimacy, the refinements and depredations of culture, and how woman artists (including the poet herself) absorb and resist the expressive norms and structures largely devised by men, these are the concerns that animate the poems in Rosanna Warren’s new collection, So Forth. An unforgettable book by one of our essential poets.”
“Rosanna Warren is a writer I read immediately, no matter the place or time: her manner is enticingly high, and the stuff is harrowingly everyday, a mother glimpsed and gone, a woman who should have been a sister. So Forth has all the signature elegance, all the learning, the hunger, but the book is newly vulnerable, both personally and politically. Warren allows for the biggest laugh while making room for tears, and these poems feel like life itself—which ought to be the simplest but is the hardest thing of all.”
“My heart was torn open and now it’s all window,’ writes Rosanna Warren in this unforgettable, untamed, unrelenting book. While her country ‘hurls itself away,’ becomes a nightmare of ‘police state,’ a place of ‘camps, / children in camps’ the poet tells us we must persist, despite it all, we ‘we must go on with our mysterious work.’ There is wisdom in these pages, self-knowledge in this voice. It is gorgeous, it is generous, it is inimitable, this offering.”
““In Rosanna Warren’s profound new collection, So Forth, desire, emptiness & the powerful contradictions of women’s lives stir up ‘a storm of wants.’ Warren relies on the hopeless ‘etceteras’ of our blood muscle, the heart, insisting on itself, on its ‘so forth,’ its circulate similes, sprung into terrifying poetry, into such rhetorical immortality.”
“This is Rosanna Warren’s testament to making life while resisting the insensitivities and brutalities of the day. It sees purpose in art, but especially in nature, and searches for a way to reconcile the two, where too often it seems obvious and easy to do so. It’s not. And the fluidity of the poetry is often counter to the complexity of considering if such a reconciling is possible or desirable. Unique.”
“This is a book of love and war, rich with poems of desire and rage, situated in our nearly unbearable historical moment, alive to its challenges and pleasures. Rosanna Warren uses passion and calculation in equal measure to grapple with an uncertain future—in this, she is the best of citizens, loving her world in the midst of fierce disenchantment. The poems combine lavish but pellucid description, and a disarming directness that senses the heart of the matter with unmatched agility.”
De notre vivant: selected poems in french, translated by Aude Pivin, Æncrages & Co, 2019.
“De notre vivant regroupe un ensemble de poèmes publiés dans différents recueils de Rosanna Warren entre 2003 et 2017. Auteure reconnue et saluée par la critique et le public aux Etats-Unis, elle n'a encore jamais été publiée en France, à part sur des revues en ligne. Ces poèmes, imprégnés d'une mythologie forte et sublimés par une pureté de rythme, nous embarquent à travers des paysages tantôt américains, tantôt français, tantôt urbains, tantôt bucoliques, et viennent interroger le monde, l'Histoire, l'art, la perte, le désir.”
EARTHWORKS: SELECTED POEMS, the American Philosophical Society Press, 2016.
In this inspiring volume, Rosanna Warren chronologically arranges poems selected from her four published collections of poetry. She places the poetry “under the protection of two poetry saints: William Blake and Hart Crane,” and convincingly reminds us that “poems have work to do: to bear witness, to cry out, to lament, to praise. They should be psalms for their time.”
Ghost in a Red Hat (poems),
W. W. Norton, 2011
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011
“A significant contribution to the national imaginary.”
“This is a beautiful, electric book.”
“These poems are what Wallace Stevens called an enlargement of life.”
“Achieves a delicate balance between structural solidity and movement...Warren’s latest poems tend to veil their complexity in understatement.”
“Tautly elegant...This deeply personal set of poems beautifully wanders and wonders.”
“Original and tensile in language, saturated with intellect, feeling, deeply researched knowledge—the range of reach here is stunning.”
Departure (poems),
W. W. Norton, 2003
“The poems in Departure exemplify the radiance that poems can shed, even when telling the darkest and most elegiac of stories.”
“Rosanna Warren lives in our tarnished, everyday, ramshackle world of loss, anguish, and sacrifice, but she inhabits almost as vividly a realm of classic purity: and in some of her best, most moving poems she dwells in both regions at once, and within, as it seems, the same breath. It is a beautiful miracle of bilocation.”
“In this fourth book of her own poetry (the first since 1993’s much-honored Stained Glass), long and masterfully elaborate sentences and unrhymed stanzas follow the poet’s eye and mind across the landscapes of Europe and New England...Intensely personal work.”
Stained Glass (poems),
W. W. Norton, 1993
Lamont Poetry Prize, The Academy of American Poets
“Stained Glass is a distinguished and elegiac book: somber, frequently bitter, but always invested with an authentic, quite marvelous aesthetic dignity.”
“Tough-minded, beautifully crafted meditations...Stained Glass is a work of acute, uncompromising vision.”
Each Leaf Shines Separate (poems),
W. W. Norton, 1984
In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence “as though to seize on a new life.” Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth—in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation—and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief.
Snow Day (poems),
Palaemon Press, 1981
“Snow Day is like no other first book that I have read. None of its risks is calculated, none of its successes approximate. It is filled with a clear, unforced intelligence. Its dense music and unwillingness to forget the world in its most fugitive guises give it a beautiful intensity that would be remarkable in any book.”
“Rosanna Warren’s poems are like pure water falling from a hill reflecting light and giving cool sustenance. They are like pure intelligence. They deal with nature, love, historical persons, old and new events in depths of perceptions realized in refusals of too much passion, too much despair. Her poems are clear, elegantly poised, refreshing to the taste and good to possess.”