Dropping Into the Flower by Susan Deborah King, Paperback, 9780985981815 | Buy online at The Nile
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Dropping Into the Flower

Poems

Author: Susan Deborah King  

Paperback

A worldly bouquet of powerfully lyrical poems about flowers evokes our connections to the natural world, to ourselves, each other.

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Summary

A worldly bouquet of powerfully lyrical poems about flowers evokes our connections to the natural world, to ourselves, each other.

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Description

"King has an eye and ear at times reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Amy Clampitt, Frost. 'Riveting': that's the word that summarizes this poet most accurately. She sees and feels things up close, in ways rare in American poetry these days. The eye on the object, and the rhythm of the experience, even if that object is humble as an earthworm."--Brendan Galvin

In Dropping into the Flower, her fifth full-length collection of poems, Susan Deborah King focuses in lush, sensual detail, on many varieties of flower, celebrating their qualities and allowing them to speak to her imagination. Close observation leads her, through the flowers, to explore love, mortality, ecology, myth, history, politics, healing, grief, and the transcendent.

In a voice suffused, by turns, with passion, vulnerability, confidence, wonder, playfulness, and insight, and in a style rich with rhythm and sound effects, she extends to the reader a generous bouquet, vibrant and fragrant with immediacy of being.

From "Flowers that are Truly Orange are Relatively Few"

If I had only one day, I'd want to burst as they do: peeled out, with feelers, bold as leaping cossackstrumpeting over green -starfires, with petals softas the cheeks of a child.

Her work having appeared widely in nationally recognized journals, Susan Deborah King is the author of four other poetry collections, including One-Breasted Woman and Tabernacle: Poems of an Island. She teaches creative writing and leads retreats on creativity and spirituality.


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Critic Reviews

“Anyone anticipating something conventional from these flower poems is in for a stunning surprise. Dropping Into The Flower is by turns passionately sexual, wrenching, heartbreakingly elegiac, humorous, tender, joyous, celebratory--and always unexpected. Susan King has indeed dropped deep into the flower of our complicated, confusing lives and given us metaphors to help us understand them. In one poem, 'Bringing Them Back Out,' she writes of someone who happens upon flowers in her garden and is mesmerized by their gorgeous colors: 'They didn't see you coming./ They didn't have time to close up.' That is what will happen to the reader of this collection. You won't see what is coming, and you won't have time to close up."--Susan Allen Toth, author of Leaning into the Wind In one of the poems in Dropping into the Flower, Susan Deborah King writes of the 'intersection where/heaven turns to earth and earth to heaven.' There is a majestic yearning for harmony between the realms of spirit and flesh in these poems. They put me in mind of the best in the tradition of the Romantic poets in the way they celebrate the beauties of the physical world while acknowledging the darker truths of loss. This collection deserves to be in the company of Wordsworth and Frost and Mary Oliver."--Jim Heynen, author of The Fall of Alice K.: A Novel What are we to learn from the loss of loved ones, from the unspeakable tragedy of a young person's accidental gun death, from wounds that can never heal, from bombs and plagues and mass killings? Sam King, a gentle leader indeed, teaches us to plant our griefs and sorrows along with our tulip bulbs -- and then to watch, wait and witness the explosion of life they hold. In these poems, she does God's work."--Sarah T (Sally) Williams, former book editor, the Minneapolis Star Tribune Bright, lively, high-powered, sensuous: Susan Deborah King's Dropping into the Flower is no ditzy stroll through daisies. The world's mayhem, 'hideous with grief' remains elbow-near. But King offers readers these beautifully crafted poems; they remind us that a garden's life-cycle can '...raise the alarming/ standard of love.' Her poems are allegories, metaphors, crescendos of passion, of life. They are irrepressible outbursts like the graffiti King found on the Appalachian Trail: 'I was love.' This is poetry that urges us to see that '...(to) have one's essence be/to another/(is) utterly essential...' and to live, 'as if your soul were a seed splitting open.'"--Sharon Chmielarz, author of Love from the Yellowstone Trail”


"Anyone anticipating something conventional from these flower poems is in for a stunning surprise. Dropping Into The Flower is by turns passionately sexual, wrenching, heartbreakingly elegiac, humorous, tender, joyous, celebratory--and always unexpected. Susan King has indeed dropped deep into the flower of our complicated, confusing lives and given us metaphors to help us understand them. In one poem, 'Bringing Them Back Out, ' she writes of someone who happens upon flowers in her garden and is mesmerized by their gorgeous colors: 'They didn't see you coming./ They didn't have time to close up.' That is what will happen to the reader of this collection. You won't see what is coming, and you won't have time to close up."--Susan Allen Toth, author of Leaning into the Wind

"In one of the poems in Dropping into the Flower, Susan Deborah King writes of the 'intersection where/heaven turns to earth and earth to heaven.' There is a majestic yearning for harmony between the realms of spirit and flesh in these poems. They put me in mind of the best in the tradition of the Romantic poets in the way they celebrate the beauties of the physical world while acknowledging the darker truths of loss. This collection deserves to be in the company of Wordsworth and Frost and Mary Oliver."--Jim Heynen, author of The Fall of Alice K.: A Novel

"What are we to learn from the loss of loved ones, from the unspeakable tragedy of a young person's accidental gun death, from wounds that can never heal, from bombs and plagues and mass killings? Sam King, a gentle leader indeed, teaches us to plant our griefs and sorrows along with our tulip bulbs - and then to watch, wait and witness the explosion of life they hold. In these poems, she does God's work."--Sarah T (Sally) Williams, former book editor, the Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Bright, lively, high-powered, sensuous: Susan Deborah King's Dropping into the Flower is no ditzy stroll through daisies. The world's mayhem, 'hideous with grief' remains elbow-near. But King offers readers these beautifully crafted poems; they remind us that a garden's life-cycle can '...raise the alarming/ standard of love.' Her poems are allegories, metaphors, crescendos of passion, of life. They are irrepressible outbursts like the graffiti King found on the Appalachian Trail: 'I was love.' This is poetry that urges us to see that '...(to) have one's essence be/to another/(is) utterly essential...' and to live, 'as if your soul were a seed splitting open.'"--Sharon Chmielarz, author of Love from the Yellowstone Trail

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About the Author

Susan Deborah King teaches writing and leads retreats on spirituality and creativity. Her last poetry book was Coven (2006). She lives in Minneapolis and on an island in Maine with her husband, and is mother to grown twin daughters.

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Product Details

Publisher
Holy Cow Press
Published
3rd September 2013
Pages
112
ISBN
9780985981815

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