No Need of Sympathy

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Description

Any one poem in Fleda Brown's eighth collection may touch on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, the nature of poetry, and the nature of reality. There are sonnets for all ten grandchildren written by a grandmother, poems about the Big Bang, about child labor, the moon over Paris, and tent caterpillars, all written with humility, humor, curiosity, and a deep love of life.

The dead seem like holes in the universe,
each a random fuzz-spot, a sad little purse.

Fleda Brown's awards include the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.

Reviews

Washington Independent Review of Books 'February Exemplar' "Brown's poetry "reads the way a dream feels ... There are so many wonderfully thoughtful -- beautiful -- pieces here: a collection of very personal sonnets to her grandchildren ... homages to old family photos ... remembering desperate, deceitful students ... There are close to fifty poems here, and they all are simply wonderful ..." -Library Thing "This slender volume feels like a coffee table art book. It has that kind of weight. It's images rise from each page gradually..." -The Broadkill Review "In every move she makes, she works the extremes in poetry, to combine passive thoughts and active situations to create a polarizing tension of intellectual excitement. In poetry, our thinking comes first -- then with Brown, come the complications and layers. Her brand is weaving disparate thought forms. Sylvia Plath called poetry 'a tyrannical art.' Brown is meticulous at it. For her, nothing but the best will do." -Washington Independent Review of Books "Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one's life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present." -World Literature Today "throughout this fine book, Brown sweeps a seine net through what might seem like only loosely-schooling facts of the world, but through each poem's intelligent movement and construction, the vibrant connections emerge...Brown's work insists that the poetry of the earth--that is to say, poetry itself--is ceasing never"-Miramar Poetry Journal

Author Bio

Fleda Brown's memoir Driving With Dvork was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her six collections of poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer's Award, and have twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Brown's poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prize-winning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, and former poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.