Cup Poems Poems by Jeredith Merrin eBook Jeredith Merrin
Download As PDF : Cup Poems Poems by Jeredith Merrin eBook Jeredith Merrin 
Jeredith Merrin’s third collection, Cup, deftly muses on art, travel to exotic locations, nature’s gains and losses, the resiliency of spirit juxtaposed against the body’s frailty, the joys and discords of the familial unit, and aging without bitterness and giving “Praise/ to her or him who keeps, past sixty/ and in all weathers, an open heart.” This collection of abundant wit, insight, longing and passion is deservedly a special honoree of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.
PRAISE FOR CUP
In Cup we meet a poet of rare power and unique originality, unafraid of feeling, able to take on matters of the deepest consequence. Jeredith Merrin strikes me as admirably hard-minded, shunning poeticisms and needless wordage, delivering again and again the real thing. For proof, see the title poem, or the wonderful tribute to John Clare. Plunge in anywhere, and be regaled.
—X.J. Kennedy, Judge for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award
“. . . stanzas, rooms, lives./ And you, toiling to make it better,/ whatever your it is./ Each has a cup.”
In these forthright and moving poems written in restrained, disciplined stanzas, the stories are told of how we each, “trying to make it better,/ whatever . . . it is,” have to find our own cup, and find it acceptable. This is most vividly so in the poems about the bravery and laughter required by a terrible sickness, but also in the very description of a block of still-inhabited Victorian houses, porch after porch, which is like a train going who knows where. The poems’ stanzas are the rooms, and in the rooms are the lives.
—David Ferry, winner of the National Book Award
In Cup, Jeredith Merrin confronts time’s confounding passage, but there’s not a glimmer of self-pity here, no mourning the fate of an aging body. Instead she offers us an artful contemplation of what age brings the strangeness of shifting perspectives, the quiet richness of sustained love, and the unabated force of old griefs. Both witty and meditative, these poems brim with insight and affection. And “Lear’s Macaw” alone is worth the price of admission!
—Mark Doty, author of Paragon Park
Jeredith Merrin’s exhilarating poems pulse with memory, with art, and the complex emotional richness that is the present. At the book’s heart is a sequence of poems of helpless shock and of the courage of her adult daughter’s confrontation with cancer “She’s doing it, my grown/ child, with characteristic kindness and/ intelligence. . . .” We recognize not only a mother’s love, but also fury in the midst of crisis, and, most movingly, her admiration. The wished-for reprieve, “our raft saved for now,” is, when it comes, “Easeful.” These are understated yet passionate poems that ravish with their gallant dignity. Merrin’s Cup is large and it is full.
—Gail Mazur, author of Figures in a Landscape
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeredith Merrin—brought up in the Pacific Northwest—took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), she lives near Phoenix.
Cup Poems Poems by Jeredith Merrin eBook Jeredith Merrin
Here is a collection of poetry that one must read, reread and on and on. Its memories captured are both of a personal past and a mythic one in which we are daughters hurt, mothers hurting, Cain and Abel, young and old. With its striking metaphors--"The Big roar" of life's waves, or its turns of phrase, "laughing, for dear life," or her imagining herself into dark areas and possible death, Merrin comes out on the other side where her "Cup" runneth over! Katherine H. BurkmanProduct details
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Cup Poems Poems by Jeredith Merrin eBook Jeredith Merrin Reviews
Jeredith Merrin is a poet of elegance, learning, and imagination who enlists her masterful art in the service of lucidity . Most importantly, she is a writer whose witty, moving, compassionate, and unsentimental poems show us that true wisdom comes from the heart. The poems in CUP entertain and educate, but above all they connect and sustain. You will emerge from this book with clearer eyes and a bigger heart.
In a telling little poem about Beethoven's Sixth, Jeredith Merrin evokes a musical masterpiece with a single color — "Yellow / But nothing sour” — and the presence of child abuse with its absence —“A world without / A beating to walk into." This is artistry that refuses to point to itself, that keeps vanishing behind the content it orchestrates. But the artistry is always there, in an unfailing ear for natural speech (see The Visit), in a selective use of partial rhyme (see the moving homage to John Clare), in a perfect control of extended tropes (see the delectably playful Palm Wrong Song) and in occasional eruptions of declarative force "There is no other life. / It costs us dearly."
This is a book that accepts the poet's historic challenge, to capture in the smallest possible space the largest possible sense of human existence. That challenge is all the tougher today, now the heady excitement of modernism is history, and the formal certainties that preceded it are pre-history, and we are left with an infinite smorgasbord of aesthetic possibilities in which every choice evokes a pang of familiarity.
Jeredith Merrin escapes the dilemma by discarding the slightest hint of poetic pretension, while at the same time deftly exercising her craft. What wins through is a candid and compassionate record of everyday experience, layered by time and enriched by wisdom. This is a writer who refuses to avoid the pain of existence, but also refuses to roll in it. Aging is a theme that perfectly suits her mode, no better than in the lovely Desert Sunset Pavane "Like children learning ballroom dancing / — careful of their posture, / remembering to smile, / proceeding with light gravity — / we step into old age."
What keeps this work close to the edge of suffering, but not mired in it, is a light blush of humor — neither raucous nor cynical, but rather a gentle wryness that comes from bravely seeing what is. There's a wonderfully evocative account of a canceled trip to Brazil (Lands You’ll Never See) a poignant and funny emblem of all our unlivable dreams.
The cup of the title is apt both in its ordinariness and its archetypal power. This book is a small container holding a vast amount of life.
In Jeredith Merrin’s singular 9/11 poem, “Stories,” she explores the various “ways we tip the scales to keep the balance” through the reaction of fellow artists at the MacDowell Colony in the days directly following the attack
At dark, the large group gathered in my cabin,
sipping brandy from unmatched coffee cups.
After a while, we began to sing
songs from different decades, our various childhoods
--Broadway show tunes, Beach Boys, all-girl groups--
loudly, foolishly laughing, for dear life.
This poem alone is reason enough to buy Cup, Merrin’s third and most accomplished collection. The book brims with treasures. As in her earlier books, Shift and Bat Ode, Merrin brings her intellectual and emotional generosity and her wit to bear on an unpredictable range of topics. Here often she turns her attention to the business of aging in contemporary Western society. In “New Year,” Merrin offers up a song of praise
...to the man or woman who stays open
to the river of each day. Praise
to her or him who keeps, past sixty
and in all weathers, an open heart.
The poems in Cup are clearly the result of the poet’s own unflinching openness, whether it be towards the hand-me-down humiliations parents inflict upon their children in “Surfing the Pororoca,” and the poet’s own shortcomings in “A Woman under the Influence” and “The Resistant Reader in the Age of Memoir,” or the “automatic/ unconvincing noises/about what may be gained” through the undeniable losses of senescence in “Old Movies.”
Images of physical balance recur throughout the book, from the surfers who ride a churning twelve-foot Brazilian tidal bore in the book’s remarkable opening poem, to the “burdened camels” in “Lands You’ll Never See,” creatures “...so balanced over the sand/ their two-toed hooves leave no prints where they pass.” So, too, does the theme of maintaining one’s existential equilibrium in the midsts of devastating change.
Cup is divided into five sections. The second and most personal of these is a sequence of poems about the poet’s adult daughter’s cancer. Here with characteristic passion and restraint, Merrin confronts the most calamitous event in a parent’s life “...that wild, unmitigated/ sense of something wrong--which is how this feels// to hear in your child’s voice a terrible,/ gentled acceptance of what must be borne.”
While Merrin’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live on the pages as uniquely themselves, the poet never loses sight of the universality and timelessness of their experience. She finds commonality with the unexpected figure of a legendary Sumerian mother who expressed her anguish more than four thousand years ago
Ninsun, mother of the hero
beseeches the sun-god that Gilgamesh might go
unharmed on his journey to murder
the monster--
that he be watched over by the stars.
Despite the extremity of her distress. Merrin has no use for sentimentally. She writes
...As it turns
out Shamash is only one of several
gods in this story all take bribes and quarrel.
Who, anymore, in need calls out to them?
Her ancient wish and my wish are the same.
A different sort of love poem, one which will doubtlessly be widely anthologized, is “Desert Sunset Pavane.” The verse ends with the heartbreakingly tender and beautiful image of the poet and her beloved
Like children learning ballroom dancing
--careful of their posture,
remembering to smile,
proceeding with light gravity--
we step into old age.
It is precisely this seemingly oxymoronic quality of “light gravity” that makes so many poems in this volume unmistakably, unforgettably the work of Jeredith Merrin. Don’t miss it.
Here is a collection of poetry that one must read, reread and on and on. Its memories captured are both of a personal past and a mythic one in which we are daughters hurt, mothers hurting, Cain and Abel, young and old. With its striking metaphors--"The Big roar" of life's waves, or its turns of phrase, "laughing, for dear life," or her imagining herself into dark areas and possible death, Merrin comes out on the other side where her "Cup" runneth over! Katherine H. Burkman
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