A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Edited by Annie Finch
Textos
Books is proud to reissue Annie Finch's landmark anthology of women's formal
poetry, A Formal Feeling Comes.
The definition of formal poetry developed for the editing of this book--that formal poems are "structured by the conspicuous repetition of any language element"-- encompasses blues forms and sonnets, sapphics and chants, and the book includes poets from Rita Dove and Marilyn Hacker to Sonia Sanchez, May Sarton, and Anne Waldman. Each of the 60 poets introduces her poems with a brief essay on the role of form in her work.
"Halfway through the book, I drank a glass of good Oregon pinot noir, and suddenly the poems themselves began to open to me. Poems that had seemed a prison for words now became houses with doors leading in and out. I understood again how much the mind craves form. The archetypes that command the way we think and behave are not invented by the mind but are extracted by the mind from the perfect or nearly perfect forms in nature." -- Alice Evans in The Eugene Weekly
"Part of what is valuable about A Formal Feeling Comes is the way it reveals that hidden strand of formal women's poetry which persisted even while Pound, Williams, Joyce and other male modernists wanted to end the 'idea of poetry for ladies.'"--Sue Standing in The Boston Review
ISBN: 978-1933456959, 332 pages, $25.00