My Shining Archipelago: 92 (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Softcover

Talvikki Ansel's My Shining Archipelago is the winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her book gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says James Dickey in his foreword, ""Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism-more, always more, in the Amazon basin."" This cycle of ""freewheeling sonnets"" (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things-Shakespeare's Caliban-is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.

Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism, the never-failing imagination based on burning and burning out, death already quivering with rebirth, and behind that, death and rebirth again. More, always more, in the Amazon basin, as though God were helpless in this overconcentrated excess and created by necessity or compulsion: that, here, reality is compelled to be thus.