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Horizon
Note
Robin
Behn
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, General Editor
Winner of the 2001 Brittingham Prize
in Poetry, selected by Mark Doty
A son is born too early, as if
coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father
lingers at life's other horizon, although his brain seems already
to have crossed it. In language dense and clear, playful and
somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude,
Behn traverses these horizons with a musician's as well as a
poet's ear, extracting, like the horizon note that drones
through traditional Indian music, "a red needle from the
sky."
"Horizon
Note turns speech into music, even as it resists and questions
the slippery, beloved, difficult stuff it's made of. Behn makes
live, breathing art out of language's terrible limitations, the
paradoxical ways it both enables and betrays us."—Mark
Doty, Judge, Citation for the 2001
Brittingham Prize in Poetry
"The light off the poems in Horizon
Note is blinding at times, proximity and vastness traversed,
vectored, a flying without instruments, almost here, almost home.
It's a book that trusts the elements. Behn finds the free-fall
of her range, her mythic nature. "—Deborah
Digges, author of Rough Music
"Behn can be intimate as well as expanseive
. . . a rich, sensuous collection of poems that achieves a great
fullness of experience."—David Baker, editor of the Kenyon Review
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Robin
Behn
is the recipient of fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Arts. She is
the author of two previous collections of poetry, Paper Bird
and The Red Hour, and co-editor of The Practice
of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. She directs
the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.
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September
2001
LC: 2001002082 PS
100 pp. 6 x 9
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