Grains of the Voice
Trade Paper – $16.95
ISBN 978-0-8101-5228-1Grains of the Voice
Christina Pugh’s Grains of the Voice exhibits a pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations. The human voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds—all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occasion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems are eclectic in their allusiveness, filled with echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of songs both popular and obscure, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. But Pugh always wears her learning lightly. Beneath the jewellike surfaces of her poems is a strenuous investigation of the nature of and need for communication and a celebration of the endless variety of its forms.
“No poet of her generation can match Christina Pugh’s sheer lyricism. I mean not only her gift for writing precise and beautiful lines and sentences—though the poems in Grains of the Voice are so fine that you could use them to cut glass—but also Pugh’s passionate intelligence, her ability to carve shapes from language that promise to endure, even as they remain open to the unknown and the incomplete, revealing that vulnerability from which song derives in the first place.”—Peter Campion, author of The Lions
“Christina Pugh is a master of voice, its shades and swayings, and a superb shaper of sound and argument. In Grains of the Voice she shows herself a world-making poet, and presides over her creation with a fine, pressing energy.”—David Mikics, coauthor of The Art of the Sonnet (with Stephen Burt)