Keelan - Missing Her

Claudia Keelan

Claudia Keelan is the author of five previous collections of poetry including Refinery, The Secularist, Utopic, and The Devotion Field. Her awards include the Jerome Shestack Award from the American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, the Robert D. Richardson Award from the Denver Quarterly and the Silver Pen Award from the State of Nevada. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Body Electric (Norton), American Hybrid (Norton), Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath), and The Book of Irish American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press). She lives in Las Vegas with her husband, the poet Donald Revell, and their children Ben and Lucie.

Also by Claudia Keelan

Utopic (2000)
The Devotion Field (2004)

Missing Her

$15.00 paper | 79 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-86-9
Publication Date: Oct 5, 2009
Buy: Amazon.com | spdbooks.org

The Green Rose Series

In poems performed via scat singing, via documentary, poems devoted to the sui generis, Missing Her redefines the elegy as a seeking statement.

"Keelan's work, always politically engaged, here takes a tender and personal turn. Much of what is mourned in these interwoven elegies is private, close in, but even the
larger, more public themes—the Vietnam War, Jesus, the oil industry, September 11—are brought to an intimate scale. The central long poem 'Everybody's Autobiography' achieves a masterful fusion of political history, personal responsibility, and communal grief. A deep-feeling collection not afraid to look loss in the face."
—Cole Swensen

"The striking long poem 'Everybody's Autobiography' recalls Keelan's own and others' pasts. Keelan, one of our best, if too little known, experimental poets, does what she can in this sixth collection to steady 'the human boat' which 'Came capsizing...// Came lost.'"
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Poem

Rabbits

Pressed beyond zero                            I pressed my ear to her

I found a channel           & radioing         Came a colony

Rousseau’s rabbits                            A dream of population

          A dream of unpreparing                       To prepare

A population of rabbits        I would never see         But dream of

                           Forever in my absence from them

In the generation the newest population I and my dream

          Of them         Became her         Then it was I was under

I was below stars          I gave up my dream there

                                                    Under as in beneath

A light so profound a light very possibly streaming

          From a star            Dead already thousands of years

And yet I saw it            So you can see me               As you see her

          As I give up me       For generations        To prepare by