Memlings Veil

by Mary Ruefle

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...

Reviews

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating to read Ruefle's most recent collections and then be thrown into her debut book. A great book of poems (published when she was 30) and a fine origin story. A personal favorite:

| Red Sleeves |

A great upheaval rehearses itself
in a woman reading the last stanza
of an elegy in which a man disfigured
for life is preparing to fight a hummingbird.
She crys softly into her red sleeves.
The candle also is red, and white where
mice have gnawed out their hearts,
passing another winter like crazy women
changing lip color in a ladies' room.
Everything outside is brown and full of
ideas: not quite spring, a woodpecker
percolates in the top of a butternut tree.
He has not yet shown his breast.
Soon, fat roses will be breathing
heavily in the dark.

[Eric T. Voigt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Though the little wooden bridge in May still joins- I can't distinguish my finest memory from among the worthless." (pg. 57) That's how she starts a poem. Switching between reminiscence of the pastoral to crushing self-doubt? Absolutely par for the course. There are casually grumpy critiques of Franz Kafka, vivid descriptions of an evening in a neighborhood, and plenty of sarcasm butting right up against astonishing dreamworld scenarios.

[Jesica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notable poems : Becoming This, Six Arguments with Kafka, Indisputable, White Trees - esp this line : how you have wasted your mouth, As When I Did Not Exist - esp this line : More than once / I have been no one

[Molly Brodak · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely stunning.