At Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone
On this strung-out strand where once the Saracens raidedand the bishop defended, now only surf whirs in—tumble, soothe, and seethe of waves at a slow boil.We lie motionless and cracked as driftwood.Middle age has tossed us here. Salt sears each wave,sand crusts your eyebrows and the rim of each earand the sun licks hunchbacked breakers with a tongue of fire.Hypnosis of foam: the surf sounds endless.Nothing is endless. The cathedral of Maguelonehulks, a battered shell on a wind-roughed island.Sea gulls perch on the rafters in the shadow of cypress.And if we two, sprawled below on the sand, are burnedand offered, it is to no god we will nameand the sea that lulls us is spelling its own end.Yet we are given. For now, day is suspended,a kiss is a salt mirage in smitten air,the brush of your hand on my hip a tremor of sunburn.I could see you, but instead I turn my head,glance up, and the whole sky hurtles down—and wherewe were, we aren't: just a long horizontal seizureof aquamarine. Tide spittle. The shuddering shore.
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- February 4, 2021
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“At Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone” from SO FORTH: by Rosanna Warren.
Published by W.W. Norton & Company May 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Rosanna Warren.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joel Cohen
Rosanna Warren teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently So Forth (2020) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). Her biography of Max Jacob, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, appeared in October 2020. She has published a book of literary criticism and edited a volume of essays about translation, and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others.
New York, New York
A lyrical new volume from a poet “beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets” (Harold Bloom).
"The enrichments and diminishments of aging, ambivalence in the context of intimacy, the refinements and depredations of culture, and how woman artists (including the poet herself) absorb and resist the expressive norms and structures largely devised by men, these are the concerns that animate the poems in Rosanna Warren’s new collection, So Forth. An unforgettable book by one of our essential poets."
—Alan Shapiro, author of Against Translation
"'My heart was torn open and now it’s all window,’ writes Rosanna Warren in this unforgettable, untamed, unrelenting book. While her country ‘hurls itself away,’ becomes a nightmare of ‘police state,’ a place of ‘camps, / children in camps’ the poet tells us we must persist, despite it all, we ‘we must go on with our mysterious work.’ There is wisdom in these pages, self-knowledge in this voice. It is gorgeous, it is generous, it is inimitable, this offering."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, a National Book Award finalist
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