Ocean Avenue
Malena Mörling

Winner of the 1998 New Issues Poetry Prize
Philip Levine, Judge

"Like a modern-day Whitman the poet loiters at her ease, in her case, among the crowds of Grand Central Station 'a little ecstatic/from looking up at the constellations / in the green and gold ceiling.' Listening 'to the skinny violinist play Paganini' she stands still, letting the music touch her and feels 'the whole station inside' her awareness. Thus it is also a book of enormous calm; indeed, I cannot think of another collection of contemporary poetry more conscious of our need for the violence of continual change and more at peace in the center of that violence. . .This is poetry whose aim is no less than to recall us to what Wallace Stevens regarded as the greatest gift of creation: to live in a physical universe."

      —Philip Levine

"Malena Mörling's poems lend new perspectives about what it is to see and hear and wonder, about what it is to be alive."

      —Michael Burkard

"Mörling is deeply aware of the moment of 'passing through' and it informs her poetry. Ocean Avenue is subtle, lovely, and original."

      —Gerald Stern

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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