Sea Gate

by Jocelyn Emerson

Poetry. The poetry which comprises SEA GATE meditates on the provisional, fleeting nature of the self. Elegiac and intensely musical, Emerson's poems draw on geology, cosmology, theology, and physics to render visible the complex relationship between spirit and the material world. "Attending to both John Clare and to Emmanuel Levinas, SEA GATE advances gracefully the project of recent American poets who have sought, through poetry, to know this world,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1882295358
• ISBN13: 9781882295357
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

a book full of rich and strange beauty

Jocelyn Emerson is one of the most talented poets writing today, a writer for whom mind and music are one. Sea Gate melds the intellectual and the sensuous, the rigorous and the lyrical, in poems that both contain and transcend their occasions.Sea Gate combines Dickinson's obliquity and abrupt surprise (in such lines as "Encumbered water, salt drift and reticent" or "like hungry wind/working leaves to contingency"), Stevens' marriages of image and idea in new wholes partaking of both (in such lines as "from an idleness inside the havoc of August/into the slack gutturals of autumn" or "a river there below to suck in all/the air-notes and with them,/a visible world turning inward"), and Hart Crane's sheer linguistic exuberance-not to mention his infatuation with the sea (in such lines as "a burning-cold and salt wave's/illegible contradiction//is splintering in tumult,/self-disclosed bright staves//spilling a sea-harvest/of insinuations").For Emerson, thinking and feeling and making are one: the poem is an act and a figure of thought, a spill of ideas and emotions like precious stones. But she is also an intensely musical poet: the mysteries her work unfolds are as much the mysteries of word as of world, and also of the intermingling of the two. The admonition in her poem "Where Breath Most Breathes" may be taken as her work's motto: "Listen to the scale of varied day,/shaken singer, to the charred song of the particle and of the mineral ash,/still and elemental in the whistling dark." Hers is a poetry in which the dark whistles and the ash sings, and momentarily the charred and broken are made whole.Sea Gate is a luminous book, dazzling as sunlight on churned water.

About Sea Gate

A friend gave me Sea Gate for my birthday, and I'm really happy he did. It's a book to read slowly and linger on every word and phrase. I keep going back and back to different poems to savor. Each poem is vivid and multi-layered. I'd recommend it highly!

A welcome addition to contemporary American poetry

Sea Gate is a beautiful book that I would highly recommend to anyone. On first reading, the lyrical language sweeps one away, like the image of the sea that runs throughout the book. On second and third readings, the book opens more and more to its readers, displaying a world of love and loss, fullness and an emptiness pierced by personal utterance. The book is rewarding not only because the experience of reading it is pleasurable, but also because the book stands up to serious attention and consideration without ever being overly intellectual.