MAGPIETY Paperback Melissa Green

Magpiety: New & Selected Poems marks the return to print of one of the most celebrated American poets of her generation.
"In the same way that Eliot's lantern throws the pattern of nerves on a screen, I see each of my books as connected to a psychic darkness that called out for a different articultion both in form and language," writes Melissa Green.
Green's first book, The Squanicook Eclogues, published in 1987, was cheered by writers such as Joseph Brodsky, who observed: "Here, by the grace and wisdom of the language in which 'rhyme' rhymes with 'time,' comes the poet who commits everything she touches to your memory."
Derek Walcott noted that "Melissa Green's reverential elations uplift and soothe the reader as naturally and as cleanly as the morning wind."
About the New & Selected, Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy K. Smith wrote: "Across the span of her career, Melissa Green has rendered that which she sees-the natural world, yes, but also the surfaces of our lives: the lingering evidence of history alongside the things we do in the here and now-in language that draws readers deep into an indelible psychic space. Magpiety attests to a heart that is fearlessly attentive to the world, and exquisitely vulnerable to the great sweep of experience."
And poet laureate Marie Howe noted: "Melissa Green might well be a 21st century version of Emily Dickinson, poet of ecstatic states and extremity. These are poems 'scratched in blood,' written by a survivor, a poet, a woman pulled back to life by 'savior language.' Go ahead I dare you. (Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?) 'Lift a serif, duck under and enter the world.'"