Don't Explain

by Elizabeth N. Sholl

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
eISBN: 978-0-299-15723-4 | Cloth: 978-0-299-15720-3 | Paper: 978-0-299-15724-1
Library of Congress Classification PS3569.H574D66 1997
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry

Selected by Rita Dove

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Betsy Sholl grew up on the NewJersey shore, lived in Boston and Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and now lives in Portland, Maine. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. She has published four books of poetry, including Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter, and Rooms Overhead . The fourth, The Red Line, won the 1991 Associated Writing Programs Award for Poetry.

REVIEWS

"Don't Explain accomplishes that most difficult of tasks: the weaving together of seemingly unrelated events so that revelation unfolds effortlessly. These poems are what narrative can aspire to—namely, the grace and ease of the lyric rhapsody. And yet the charm of the anecdotes, her facility with line and image, never take precedence over the hard facts of our daily living."—Rita Dove, Judge, Citation for 1997 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry

"These poems remind us that the most memorable verse is not merely the product of talent or skill (although Sholl's poems have always possessed both of these things in abundance), but of something more raw and ineffable—call it courage. Sholl's poems insist that there is no separation between self and world, and that the moral duty of poetry is to carry the world with the same delicacy and grace with which their speaker bears herself. Don't Explain is an urgent and prophetic book."—David Wojahn

"Our fallen world, these unflinching poems say, is not a world of lost souls—that's too Tragic, too literary—but of souls getting lost, that is, living…eventually keeping nothing out. Sholl gets to the midst of that progress by refusing the exalted aerial view—which is why Don't Explain is cause for exaltation—as again and again these poems fall back to their world, a world, Sholl says, "worth falling for." The result: poetry: the past becomes passage, undergone but never gone under."—William Olsen

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Behind the Saint-Lazare Station

The Stream

With You in the Darkness

To the Dregs

The Rim

Different Porches

Loose Keys

Undersong

Style

Mysterioso

Chances

Blues Is My Companion

Festival in the Park

Test Patterns

The Past

Hood

Pink Slip

Dogs

Midnight Flowers

Babysitting to Thelonious Monk

A Kind of Darkness

Between Pickets

The Tiny Gate

Fine Arts

Valentines

Autobiography in Third Person

Monkey House

Halfway

Falling

Four Crows at Dusk

Sparrows

Don't Explain

Redbud

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