“Harriet Zinnes’s most recent volume of poetry exhibits the wisdom and poise of a poet at the height of her considerable powers. Surely she is one of the best poets of her generation.”—Eric Miles Williamson
“In these new poems, Harriet Zinnes invents a further, unforgettable antiquity in language as pure and epigrammatic as that of the Greek Anthology. All things find voice and all speak fearlessly. Zinnes has truly discovered a whole new form of integrity here at the end of the world.”—Donald George Revell
“Alternately querulous and resigned, hopeful and despairing, Harriet Zinnes’s poems contemplate the ties that bind us all to our world—or don’t.”—Amanda Cockrell
On Wither Nonstopping
Alison Croggon: “The poetry of Harriet Zinnes opens on a universe of unsettling clarities. This is language obsessed with perception: in particular, unsurprisingly for an art critic, with the dazzling play of light, which misleads as much as it reveals. Her poems dissolve into 'implacable ambiguity' even as they invite the reader with what appears to be a childlike candour.”
“In these newest poems, Harriet Zinnes composes by unblemished Sophoclean light. Her questions are unambiguous, her answers, however complex, unequivocal. Oh, and her objects, her objects shine without and within, pure in the gratitude of being.”—Donald Revell
“The science of Zinnes's poetry is in its artistry. Objects, words, space... are arranged with poise and imminence. On the edge, we might expect them to tip into the next, but sometimes they hold. Precise, measured, but with delicacy and resolve. A unique voice, and one to be read and reread like Niedecker's.”—John Kinsella
On Drawing On The Wall:
“Harriet Zinnes has already published voluminously in several genres, but the new book is further proof that she has never been content to rest on laurels, has never resisted learning, and has always been anxious to find—for instance in old forms—new astonishment. This grace to change and to encompass becomes her gift to readers, and to readers of this book in particular. All together we, holding hands if not counting feet, plunge into these lyrical evocations of the physical—the color and sound and texture of the lived world—with the intelligent exuberance of these necessary new poems.” —Bin Ramke
“Exclamatory, questioning, descriptive, Harriet Zinnes’ line is one of unusual grace and lucidity. Mathematicians speak of a space-filling curve. Harriet’s poems are equally sinuous, leaping pianissimo from point to luminous point, the whole world her studio.” —Randolph Healy
“Harriet Zinnes is a force for an investigatory poetry. She has produced books on Ezra Pound and her own art criticism has a wide inclusivity. Her lyric poetry reminds one that the psychologists have said one turns wise or bitter, and in this poet’s case her work must be most wise, because it is the least bitter. Sweet-bitter might be the classical summation of her style. Like Miro, the poet knows the necessity of excess and her work has an intensity that is at once particular and immense.” —David Shapiro
Harriet Zinnes is Professor Emerita of English of Queens College of the City University of New York. Her many books include Whither Nonstopping (poems), Drawing on the Wall (poems), My, Haven’t the Flowers Been? (poems), Entropisms (prose poems), Lover (short stories), The Radiant Absurdityof Desire (short stories), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (criticism), and Blood and Feathers (translations of the French poetry of Jacques Prévert). She is contributing editor of The Hollins Critic and a contributing writer as art critic of The New York Arts Magazine.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9792416-9-7 (pbk.) $15.00 |
