Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and has lived in New England since 1980. She has published seven previous books of poems, most recently Book of Dog and White Sea, both from Sarabande Books. Her many awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Best American Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College in 1982, she lives with her family in East Thetford, Vermont.
Table of Contents
After the Body: New Poems
This Time, the Hawk
The Difference
Bed-bound
After Chemo
Not Myself
Dyskinesia
Through the Coffin Window
Mother Pain
The News at 2 A.M.
Arm, Etc.
What the Knife Is For
Mother
Spring
Unfinished
The Year
The River
Going Under
Broke
The Old Self
The Body, Full of Bias
Being Apart
After the Body
Silver
Selected Poems
Aerial View of Louisiana (1979)
Aerial View of Louisiana
For Maria
As You Stalk the Sleep of My Forgetting
A Place of Another Name
Bees
Getting Out
Padre Island
The Bottom Land (1983)
Black Walnut
For Blue
Body, Earth, Water
Elegy for the Other
White Field
On the Twelfth of March
Fort Wall at Mytilene: Greece, 1921
Moon and Stars over Crete: For Alexandra
Lilacs
Body, Earth, Water: A Meditation
The Center for Cold Weather (1989)
Living Next Door to the Center for Cold Weather
In a White Absence
Dancer among the Constellations
Flowers
To the Unborn
A Seasonal Record
Cleopatra Theodos
August Arrival
The Faithful
Guardian (1995)
Blues: Late August
Poem for Marriage
Who Knows
The Story
Seven Months
Not Writing
The Great Quiet
Mother's Day, 1993: Hearing That We Will Bomb Bosnia
Raptor
The Perfect Service
Earth
What to Tip the Boatman? (2001)
The Owl
Old Trick
Solstice
Noon
That Year
For Months
White Primer
Cutlery
"as if mad is a direction, like west . . ."
The Ruin
Intermediary
Reconciled
After Persephone
What to Tip the Boatman?
The Return
Persephone, Answering
Demeter the Pilgrim
Figure of Formal Loss: Pearl
Fist
White Sea (2005)
Salt
The Old Question
The Source
The Waiting
Catalpa
Cane
Burial
Want
Moon Snail
Death of a Gull
Speech to the Self
The Release
White Morning
You Must Cross the Black River
Praise Him
Soul
Book of Dog (2012)
Canis
Ants Want My Yellow Moth
Song of If-Only
Their Chamber
Essential Tremor
In Lent
Interstice
Noise
Book of Dog
Salt Water Ducks
Dune Shack
Alone
Western Conifer Seed Bug
Survival: A Guide
