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QUOTES | BOOK TALK | |||||||
The Rhythm of It — Poetry’s Hidden Dance by Anita Sullivan
We are very proud to announce that Anita Sullivan's The Rhythm of It is a 2021 Finalist for the Montaigne Medal.
In this brilliant collection of short essays, author Anita Sullivan presents her observations on the topic of rhythm in poetry, pointing out that certain poems not only feed the brain through narrative and ideas but also nourish the body through rhythm. Sullivan is not talking here about rhyme, but rather an extended palette of rhythmic patterns that are latent in normal speech but often show up in poetry when a degree of emotional intensity is applied to the words. Merely being attentive to this possibility can enrich the experience of reading poetry far beyond what might be expected. LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry ISBN: 978-1-951651-03-9 (print; softcover) Released November 2019 118 pages |
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“To read Anita Sullivan’s The Rhythm of It is to understand that poetry invokes and depends upon the rhythms of our being, as common to us as our own pulse and breath patterns (when running, sauntering, stepping out, pausing to observe). Thus for Sullivan, reading and composing alike become actions of the whole body beguiled by and engaged within patterns at once ancient and ever available for rediscovery. Animated by an intriguing, humane, and approachable voice, The Rhythm of It fine tunes our sense of how good poems can inhabit us and we them — heart, mind, and soul.” “With this book, Anita Sullivan, a quiet genius I have long known as a piano tuner and choreographer of ideas, tunes my mind to a new temperament, enriches the way I read poetry, and jolts my own writing of it with new voltage. She shows how poems seem to present meaning but actually kindle rhythm. She reveals the ghost heartbeats inside utterance on the page and in the body. She pulls away the veil from why some poems, filled with admirable qualities, fall flat, while others, seemingly simple, electrify. Sullivan does the neat trick of showing how poetry works while enriching the magic we can experience in lyric text.” |
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Review by Katie Eberhart, Oregon Poetry Association, March 1, 2020 |
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