Perpetua

Olga Broumas

In Perpetua, well-known feminist and former Yale Younger Poet Olga Broumas returns to the more direct voice of her award-winning Beginning with O. She returns, too, to a lyric poetics made more vivid by her years of work as a massage therapist, to a poetry of the body. Her poems extend a broad social empathy where joy and sadness coexist in perfect harmony.

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ISBN: 9781556590252

Format: Paperback

After Lunch

The PX wives who smuggled the dinette
set for my mother on Stadìou Street in 1956
sleep under their cilantro plants poolside in Arizona.
I sponge down the formica, lay the cloth and run
out to the car. It’s not that far
but straight onto the mountain. It’s a scar
among the dwarf pine scrub, bulldozers on each side,
the three-winged gate arching alone, a filigree of concrete,
the turned earth red, frank to the sky.
My pumps leave tractor imprints, it’s the fashion,
snakeskin finesse and vibram sole. Here, she says,
a corner lot, a jaywalk from the chapel,
florist en face, a cosmic spot: she means
socially advantageous. Her best friend’s over
there, by the far wall, terraced into abstraction.
They all admitted it, she says, I drew the choice
plot. Midday at rest
buzzes and ricochets. She shows me where
the flowerbeds will meet the promenade, her word,
and then, the wild oregano
fuming above the future
graves, we go.

About the Author

Olga Broumas was born in Syros, Greece, in 1949 and published her first book there in 1967. After moving to the United States, she received her BA in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. Her first book in English, Beginning with O, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1977. Since then she has published seven volumes of solo and collaborative poetry (with T …

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Reviews

“Readers will find Broumas’s frankness about sex… and, indeed, her openness about all the subjects she covers either offensive or delightful, but none can dismiss her talent or ignore the power of her vision.” —Booklist

“Broumas has always been a poet of light, sea, and air. Her very diction is fluid, and while Perpetua marks a turning toward more explicitly spiritual concerns, she grounds her imagery firmly in the physical.” —American Book Review

“Perpetua displays a striking sensuality. Her eroticism takes many forms… She unites a rollicking and tender love of the sensual self with an acceptance of the bonds-breaking of mortality.” —Belles Lettres

“Perpetua is Olga Broumas’s liveliest collection since her first book, Beginning with O… [won] the Yale Prize… Broumas refuses to play it safe poetically. Though the poems in Perpetua are mature in theme… they take risks with language and imagery… Broumas is invigorating.” —Kathleen Norris

“Perpetua displays a striking sensuality… Broumas’s best poems… are shaped by both a spirit of play and the nurturance of friends, family, and lovers.” —Lee Upton

“The language [in Perpetua] is one of sensuous detail, of a bodily sensuality… [Broumas] weaves a mesmerizing web of joy and sadness, hope and despair; these are songs worthy of a siren.” —Bookpaper

“These poems linger after being read.” —Library Journal

“Writing with a velocity and impulse that stretches and transforms language, Olga Broumas is one of the most exciting of contemporary poets.” —Poetry Flash

“Perpetua manifests a maturity of vision and a broader social and political engagement with the world.” —A View from the Loft

“In [Perpetua], Broumas… passionately invokes the redemptive forces of Eros to heal a world darkened by disease and oppression.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Perpetua] is a lucid and vulnerable piece of work.” —The Village Voice

“This is a wise volume… [Broumas’s] is a clear and present voice that teaches us how to live in troubled times… This reader was left yearning for more.”—Catherine Houser, The Women’s Review of Books

“In [Perpetua], Broumas kneads through the superficial layers of experience, taking us to a new, deeper awareness… Ultimately hers is a poetry of possibility… Like the tide, Broumas has returned in Perpetua to ease the marks left by our loving, to console us in our separation, in all its forms, from those we love.” —Bay Window