After Dürer
As when icy illness ends that you never expected Could possibly end, and the terrified body, enveloped
In warm water, reposes, you could kiss every child on the hand, Every leaf in the forest, every stone of the wall. A low moan escapes
The mouth. Melancholia, the accompanying spirit, is departing with Her ratty wings and crusted eyes, her suitcase of rocks.
A shy, small creature steps trembling from the brush.
Feature Date
- January 20, 2018
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Copyright © 2017 by Emily Fragos
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Hostage and Little Savage, and the editor of six poetry anthologies for the Everyman’s Pocket Library. She currently teaches at New York University and Columbia University, and lives in Manhattan.
“Emily Fragos’s poems are mysterious. Her songs make me confess to myself. In her poems, you find the God’s honest truth like wildflowers. Her poems are ferocious and saintly (you must remember, one saint, Saint Julian, murdered his mother and father, not a problem with Emily). She is somehow self-born, which is my way of saying her poems are unique, singular, necessary—wonder-full poems, very good dogs.”
—Stanley Moss
“Emily Fragos is a thin-skinned, tough-minded poet of this world. Her sensual sensibility is unrestrained by conventional perceptual grids. Her poems take us by surprise. . . . Fragos’s trust in language is fruitful, justified. No word she writes is an advertisement for herself. We are enlarged by her resonant verbal imagination.”
—Marie Ponsot
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