They have helped me love, grieve, praise, and, at the appropriate moments, curse. "There are poems in this book that I have carried in my head for decades now. This is a gorgeously important selection of the work of one of our best poets."-Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice "Eleanor Wilner's poems, old and new, are political in the best sense-her deep commitment to justice enhances her commitment to making good poems, which she achieves by wit, astonishing lyric skill, and compassionate intelligence. Working from myth and history, through grief and edgy expanse, Wilner is our oracle, the generous troubling overvoice of our age, our light, our dark, and our best."-Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief Eleanor Wilner's memory theater is a vast and glorious gathering of years of poems that question, deepen, rage, inspire, and connect. "Before books, the ancients had their memory theaters to treasure and keep in reach all they knew. And if you flip to the back, where her earliest poems are, you can see Wilner, right from the beginning, working with the question of a new mythmaking."-Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.īefore Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air-a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work.
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