The University of Wisconsin Press


Poetry


 

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

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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cover image for "Horizon Note" by Robin Behn, background is an abstract artwork of orange, tan, and silver colors.

September 2001
LC: 2001002082 PS
100 pp.    6 x 9
Book icon
Cloth $26.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-17530-6
Paper $14.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-17534-4
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