One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook Nonnie Augustine
Download As PDF : One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook Nonnie Augustine 
This is a debut poetry collection by Nonnie Augustine, author of poetry and fiction and the poetry editor for The Linnet's Wings. The poems are written in contemporary and traditional forms and many reflect on her experiences as a professional and private person, while other poems comment on the human comedy as most of us seem to live it. There are fifty six poems in seven sections, photographs by Robert Knisel, graphic design by Robert Leslie Smith, and layout by Marie Fitzpatrick of The Linnet's Wings.
One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook Nonnie Augustine
Over the last few years the discretionary budget for books has been very sparse, and as I own a whole barnload of them already and I am always impressed with what I have not read, but that sits at arms length, I hesitate to purchase ANY books. I admit also that decades of reading of poetry of all sorts has jaded my appetite for any new poetry at all as very little of it comes across for me as particularly fresh or interesting. So it is with a great deal of pleasure that yesterday came in the mail Nonnie Augustine's book of poems and when the day of work was done I read through it a bit and had to say to self, "Hot damn, this is good stuff." It is now on my list to-do a few times to slow down and read and savor this experience of poetics. A quite powerful and clear voice that exhibits a quality that I find something of a lack of in a great deal of contemporary literary work... there is a living person, flesh and blood, compassion, joy and everyday confusion to be found at home here.Product details
|
Tags : Amazon.com: One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook: Nonnie Augustine: Kindle Store,ebook,Nonnie Augustine,One Day Tells its Tale to Another,POETRY General
People also read other books :
- The Cruel Wife edition by Kitty Williams Literature Fiction eBooks
- Hunted SW Vaughn 9781616501075 Books
- Instant Family edition by Elisabeth Rose Literature Fiction eBooks
- Replay Ken Grimwood 9782757815694 Books
- Professional Recognition edition by Kervin Straits Literature Fiction eBooks
One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook Nonnie Augustine Reviews
I am reading "One Day Tells it's Tale to Another" for the third time ..... only now much more slowly and with my yellow marker. I began writing in the margins and adding stars the second time around. There are messages for me in these poems...I was drawn into watching the dance between the magic and promise of Nonnie's dreams and the hard, sweet steps and snapshots of her life. France, Greece, Orient, New York City, Florida., somewhere, nowhere.
I keep going back to In Time page 3. The Dice Are Not to Blame page 90. The Watch page 67. I am beginning to understand why.
I found myself thinking "Yes, I've been there, I know that". I found myself thinking "I wish I had been there, I wish we could have talked". Two poems made me want to tiptoe away after reading them as if I had been an intruder. That kind of intimacy doesn't happen to me much these days.
I can tell from the book notes and the rites of passage in these poems that Nonnie's first book of poems was some time in the living and in the making. I can't wait for the second.
This couplet, taken from the first poem ("In Time") in Nonnie Augustine's splendid collection of poems, ONE DAY TELLS ITS TALE TO ANOTHER, is, I believe, a fair synopsis of the entire work. These are personal poems. Personal, yet not maudlin. There is sweetness in them, but there is also a fair amount of bitterness, of disillusion, of disappointment that a life clearly propelled by art kept bumping up against bars (handrails) and floorboards full of splinters. It's certainly no accident that another of her poems, also early on in the collection, is titled "With a Bow to Dorothy Parker." And the concluding piece in this first section, "Paid to Dance," makes painfully clear that a dancer trained and bound for classical glory must, at the end of the day, pay the rent.
Kicking off the second section--please pardon the pun--is a rollicking good chronology of a young girl's sexual awakening titled "Me, Jane." (Think Tarzan; not Eyre.) The same section closes with an ekphrastic piece titled "On a Drawing by Athos Menaboni." There's always room for conjecture where ekphrasis is concerned (i.e., Why did the poet choose to eulogize this particular piece of graphic art?), but I'll leave you, able reader, to your own conjecture once you've had a chance to read the piece.
Section 3 opens with a blank verse piece titled "After Dinner with Ted at the High Noon Café." Unless I've got a tin ear, this piece--together with its tragic narrative line--has a distinctly Mexican lilt to it. (Amazing what one can do with blank verse, and Nonnie does it here to perfection!) In this same section, Nonnie has an example of what, I suppose, passes for prose poetry in this day and time "All is Ready." If it's not already clear from the preceding, I'm not a fan of prose poetry. For me, a thing is either prose or poetry--but it can't pretend or aspire to be both, because it ends up being neither. Once again, however, I'll leave the final decision on that to you. In any case, Nonnie immediately redeems herself with another blank verse piece "At Harry's Bar." It's been several decades since I had the pleasure of visiting the two Harry's Bars--one in Florence, the other in Venice--that I know of. (There may be a third in Paris. In any case, I recently read that at least one of them is now closed...sign of the times.) In this piece, Nonnie does an exemplary job of capturing the spirit of Hemingway's old haunt.
Moving on to Section 4, Nonnie opens with a tribute to a woman, a story-teller, we can only love "Miss Cora Kelly." Once again--and much to Nonnie's credit--there's nothing maudlin about this piece. Yes, it's descriptive and has a happy ending. But what's not to like about a woman who defies most conventions, then saves the best part of herself for Friday afternoons to spin yarns before an audience of waifs? Meanwhile, the appropriately titled "Gothic" is, well, just that. I believe there's a murder involved, but I'm not well enough versed in the genre to know for certain. If many of these pieces, by the way, describe or depict some aspect of the poet's personality or experience, "Doppelgänger" comes closest, I believe, to telling us how Nonnie perceives her second (inner) self. Thanks to a very adept choice of things and images, you can almost taste the spit (and polish!) and scorn in "Modern Infidelity, a Villanelle." Woe is he who now shows a preference for high-tech toys over a lady's love and lust! And if Marilyn Monroe didn't already have the last word on what it felt like to be an object of men's less chivalrous thoughts and intentions, Nonnie has that last word for her in this adaptation of Macbeth's soliloquy she titles "Marilyn's Soliloquy."
Section 5 is preceded by a most intriguing photograph, in sepia tint, of a piece of female statuary. (All of the photographs in this collection--and, incidentally, all in sepia--are the work of Nonnie's brother, Robert Knisel.) I'm frankly not certain what its placement in front of the batch of poems that follow might suggest. I don't think, however, that Nonnie does anything haphazardly. Does she somehow identify with that piece of statuary? It's possible. Several of the pieces deal with the unhappy dissolution of a marriage. Several of the others in this section--all good ones, by the way--deal with the minutiae of life. I'll leave it to you to decipher her reasoning.
Section 6 presents a potpourri of pieces dealing with the poet's parents and siblings, as well as with many of her most private thoughts on each. There are some real gems in this section--among them, "Bob and Doris," "The Watch" and "Respite." It's one thing to admire a poet's skill with words and poetic construction, but quite another to read the most intimate revelations of how that poet may've come into being. Nature versus nurture is still a raging debate without resolution. But when we get a glimpse, through the poet's own eyes, into the home she grew up in and at the people who most immediately populated that home and her life, this glimpse takes us beyond the merely artistic. This glimpse--for lack of a better way to describe it--takes us into her soul. Section 6 takes us into Nonnie's soul, into her pith, into the things and people that first made her tick--and I, for one, am grateful for the revelation.
And finally, the concluding Section 7. I'd like to think of "In Defense," the opening piece, as an amusing (but also well-constructed) apologia for those of us who inhabit that great bulge of what psychologists call the general population's "bell curve.". I must confess that I didn't understand how "Cataracts" fit the piece it titled. It read like a nostalgic piece for a marriage gone sour. But maybe how each of us experiences the death rattle of domestic bliss also ultimately defines how we choose to title it. Maybe for Nonnie, the slow dissolution of a marriage feels like the gradual but inevitable arrival of blindness. Quite to the contrary, "Bereft Lite" is the perfect title for the piece that follows--if, like me, you relish irony. Ditto with "Alice Turns Adam Down." "Seasonal Poem" is, yes, a piece about how the poet now contributes to a community of elders at Christmastime, but the title also connotes something about the passing of life's seasons. "Whirl" is akin to what I only vaguely recall as a "list poem." But it's also a list poem with a fun rhythm! "Let Me Tell You Something" is--how shall I describe it?--a real hoot with its surprise ending! It's not for me to deliver a reveal. Better you should read the piece yourself. Unfortunately, I haven't read Raymond Carver's "All of Us." And so, the title of this penultimate piece in Nonnie's collection left me in the breach. The piece itself? A reflection upon a life fully lived. But as all fully lived lives must be, this one was also occasionally mis-lived. The concluding line ("Now it's time for some lunch"), however, delivers the appropriate Augustinian broadside. The send-off to this section and to the entire collection? "The Dice Are Not To Blame." It's a wonderful piece of formal (metrical) poetry with an unadulterated message. But once again, no reveals. You'll have to get your hands on a copy of ONE DAY TELLS ITS TALE TO ANOTHER if you want to make up your own mind about the meaning(s) of any or all of these poems.
Trust me if you can appreciate poetry, you won't be disappointed.
RRB
2/14/13
Brooklyn, NY
"One Day Tells it Tale to Another" is not only a beautiful collection of inspired poems, but a memoir. From one day to the other, the life of an artist is exposed. Nonnie Augustine, a dancer, a teacher and a poet tells about her personal life -family, friends, lovers, music, work- while adding the infinite layers of contemporary drama. "She is safe and sure on stage, under the lights," she says in the poem "Duet Between Two Performers Who Had been Lovers," and she shines as well on the luminous white of the well-crafted edition. "I got married at my parent's house. I wore borrowed pearl earrings..." Needless to say, I liked above all Nonnie's poems on love, relationships, hopes and disappointments, that type of intimate confession true artists leave as a legacy to other people less fortunate who haven't found their words or voice to say what they feel. A lovely book to own, to read and reread.
Over the last few years the discretionary budget for books has been very sparse, and as I own a whole barnload of them already and I am always impressed with what I have not read, but that sits at arms length, I hesitate to purchase ANY books. I admit also that decades of reading of poetry of all sorts has jaded my appetite for any new poetry at all as very little of it comes across for me as particularly fresh or interesting. So it is with a great deal of pleasure that yesterday came in the mail Nonnie Augustine's book of poems and when the day of work was done I read through it a bit and had to say to self, "Hot damn, this is good stuff." It is now on my list to-do a few times to slow down and read and savor this experience of poetics. A quite powerful and clear voice that exhibits a quality that I find something of a lack of in a great deal of contemporary literary work... there is a living person, flesh and blood, compassion, joy and everyday confusion to be found at home here.
0 Response to "[LU8]≫ PDF Gratis One Day Tells its Tale to Another eBook Nonnie Augustine"
Post a Comment