Written By Vievee Francis
Narrated By Vievee Francis
Length: 1 hrs and 42 mins
Release Date: 08-09-16
Print Pub: Northwestern University Press
PRAISE FOR FOREST PRIMEVAL
Winner of 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry
Winner of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
"Vievee Francis is a maker of magnificent, ferociously intelligent, deeply moving poems, but to me her poems are not just poems and this amazing book isn’t just a book. Forest Primeval is a sacred conversation with the reader, wrestling with the distressing angel for all of us, and demanding a blessing." –Patrick Donnelly
Whether following her through the landscapes in which she’s lived or the landscapes of one’s interior, Vievee Francis’s bottomless imagination continues to surprise in Forest Primeval. Who wouldn’t follow her as "her eyes scan the horizon for the promise of more," when she offers so much more here than a turn of a phrase; these poems build a world we all want to inhabit, even when times are tough, and they recall a world we’ve survived enough to celebrate in a manner that’s both dignified and primal like "eloquent tambourines" on a Sunday morning. –A. Van Jordan
Forest Primeval
SUMMARY
"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vievee Francis is an American poet. She is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of three collections of the poetry, the third of which, Forest Primeval, won the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry[1] and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts (Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards) poetry award.[2]
