The Mystery of Meteors (Poems)

After a brilliant debut with Armed Love (Wesleyan, 1973) and Come the Sweet By and By, which won the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1975, Eleanor Lerman has kept silent for twenty-five years. Her new book breaks this silence with work every bit as inventive, audacious, and passionate as her first award- winning volumes.

Cosmology, physics, ancient Egypt, alien abduction, the Internet, memory, archaeology, love: these are some of the subjects that find unlikely and original conflation in Lerman’s new collection of poems. Lerman’s new poems are like terminals where trains from many distant provinces of both the inner and outer worlds-thought, history, imagination, science, etc.-find meeting with weird and affable grace. They are intelligent but accessible. They are buoyant with a self-regarding wry humor. They bravely and unpretentiously grab hold of whatever is at hand as they approach and enter "the deep desires that split the sky."

"Eleanor Lerman is back, a different poet, quieter, older, ‘wiser,’ more earthly yet still brilliant, a coruscating daughter of the poet of the Seventies. What luck for American literature."-Richard Stern

Eleanor Lerman was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1952. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Armed Love, and Come the Sweet By and By. She has been nominated for a National Book Award, received the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press, and was the recipient of a poetry grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives and works in New York City.

Table of Contents

The Mystery of Meteors, 3
In the New School, 5
The Book of What Is in the Duat, 7
Flora Street, 9
The Farm in Winter, 11
Wild Wind, Green Tea, 13
Office in a Small City, 14
The Alchemist's Prayer/ 16
The Lesson of the Queen, 18
Remote Viewing, 20
The Strange Attractor, 22
Hyannis, 24
A California Story, 26
The Outing, 28
Dominion, 29
To Montreal, 32
Night Flight, 34
Tornado Days, 36
Missing Time, 38
Hot Town, Sukiyaki, 40
Blue Skies, Indiana, 42
What the Dark-Eyed Angel Know