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Stephanie Strickland

WHO | TRUE NORTH 5
| THE RED VIRGIN: A POEM OF SIMONE WEIL

Stephanie Strickland's books include: TRUE NORTH, 1997; THE RED VIRGIN: A POEM OF SIMONE WEIL, 1993; GIVE THE BODY BACK, 1991. TRUE NORTH was Winner of the 1997 Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, Winner of the 1996 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Copyright 1997 Stephanie Strickland, University of Notre Dame Press. To Order: 1-800-621-2736 Cost: $12 plus $3.50 shipping

"...a way of writing that sweeps text into hypertext.... Here comes our poetry for the twenty-first century--and a brilliant poet who appears at just the right moment to be our guide."said Molly Peacock of True North.

Poems from TRUE NORTH:

WHO,

then, sweeps
them loose, who diffuses

broken, shining bits, the far flung force
washed to foam on a rock face, succulents

and whelks alive inside
its razing spray? Who slings

the broth aslide in cups of ocean swell? Whose bolt
of lace, a great spill of it blowing

in the window with her pins, patterns the firmament, patterns
the phosphorescent body of an Eel making slip-knots

in the dark sea, patterns fireflies sailing
through grass at the edge

of a wood, litand unlitat twilight, giving
body to the air,

or to some, brimming, being
whose? Who?

TRUE NORTH 5

It's Easy

at the South Pole. There every
direction
is true North. Direction, there, itself

the point
turning and moving,
or the place

where you look, if you still
stand waiting.
Though

you forget
all the steps forget!
Remember,

every,
and so easy,
at

the nadir.

THE RED VIRGIN: A POEM OF SIMONE WEIL by Stephanie Strickland, was Winner of the 1993 Brittingham Prize. Copyright 1993 Stephanie Strickland University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. To Order: 1-800- 829-9559 Cost: $10.95 plus $3.00 shipping.

"This book...presents Simone Weil in the fullness of her life as a woman, as a political protester, as a spirit responding with intelligence and honesty to the pain, the inhumanity, the dishonesty of life in the twentieth century. This a book feminists have long waited for." wrote Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.

Poems from THE RED VIRGIN: A POEM OF SIMONE WEIL:

"In the English, the Provençal and Irish poems,
joy so pure it hurts; in Greek poems, pain so pure
it soothes: the mind becoming relaxed
descends a little, from its greatest
concentration, and spreads out in words;
love does the same, in acts."

This is how she talks, too focal, too close
to the tension in her thought. I would descend
lower still, bring her near me, gossip
about her, paraphrase. If I distort,
I don't abandon.
Come to her
yourself: we each build our own scaffold.

She said,

when from the depth
of our being,
we need, we seek a sound

which does mean
something: when we cry out
for an answer,

and it is not granted, then,
we touch the silence
of God--

Some begin to talk,
to themselves, as do the mad;
some give

their hearts to silence.

Copyright © by Stephanie Strickland. All rights reserved.

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