Spells for Not Dying Again

by Diana O'Hehir

Book Overview

It is Diana O'Hehir's great gift as a writer that she can encompass in language as bright and faceted as garlands of jewels the most bewildering of our common human experiences and the deepest most troublesome of our emotions, without allowing them the complexity or sentimentality which so often attends their expression. With the glyphs of ancient Egypt shadowing the voice and temperament of a fin de si cle Californian, this remarkable poet--already widely reputed for her previous collections of poetry and her distinguished fiction--has written a sequence of poems which are exactly what the title indicates, enchantments by which we avert the re-living of experiences too painful to keep contemplating. Ironically, of course, it is only by such contemplation that these "spells" achieve their great potency. Those who read and re-read these poems (few would read them just once) must find themselves, each time, purged in spirit as the rituals from the Book of the Dead effected their catharsis on Diana O'Hehir's ancient precursors.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0910055319
• ISBN13: 9780910055314
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Wild and Magical

Always the peculiar spell of Diana O'Hehir's way of using language has made her poetry exceptional, and exceptionally interesting. She has an irresistable inclination for the unexpected, doubtless because O'Hehir's imagination has a will of its own. It has a quality which brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is wild, and it is magical, but it derives from actual life and authentic emotions and ideas. The reader enters a real garden, although some of the details, creatures and scenes in it are imagined. The unique quality of this imagination seems to originate in listening, listening to a voice that is not the same as the voice we find in her fiction. It seems, in fact, "summoned." In Spells For Not Dying Again this ever-present wildness is doubled by O'Hehir's use of the Egyptian Book Of The Dead. Although the poems begin with the problems O'Hehir encountered in dealing with the death of her ex-husband, years after a troubled marriage and divorce, the poems also deal with other deaths, including the expectation of her own.