“Stained Glass is a distinguished and elegiac 
book: somber, frequently bitter, but always invested with an authentic, 
quite marvelous aesthetic dignity. It marks the emergence into highly 
individual voice of an important poet of the eminence of the late May 
Swenson, beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living 
American poets. Some of the poems―‘Season Due,’ ‘Science Lessons,’ most 
of all, ‘The Broken Pot’―are worthy of canonization. ―Harold Bloom
 Rosanna Warren's first collection of poetry, Each Leaf Shines Separate,
 announced the emergence of a fresh voice in contemporary American 
poetry and earned praise from John Hollander, Richard Eberhart, and Mark
 Strand. Now, in her second book, Rosanna Warren has fulfilled her 
promise. In Stained Glass she continues to examine, as John Hollander 
said of her first book, "the relation of art to nature, exploring the 
ultimate naturalness of the world of picture, and reading tenderly and 
shrewdly the forms of fable in which reality presents itself to the 
passionate gaze." Yet in this volume the poems are more personal and 
intimate―they possess an emotional depth that extends the earlier work. 
Stained Glass is a book of mourning. It begins with an echo of Milton's 
Lycidas and concludes with an evocation of Iliad XXIV; in its course it 
touches on many scenes of loss, personal and impersonal. In the voice of
 an Eskimo mother, in a Parisian market scene, in brilliant translations
 of poems by Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy, to the more intimate elegies,
 the human drama unfolds within the larger rhythms of the natural 
landscape. In poems that are classical and eloquent, ranging from 
sonnets and rhymed quatrains to highly flexible free verse, Warren 
vividly probes the savagery of aging, the corruption of the human body 
and human estrangement from the divine, evoking as well scenes of simple
 tenderness and beauty. This year's recipient of an Ingram Merrill grant
 and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets that honors a 
poet of exceptional merit under the age of forty, Rosanna Warren is 
clearly one of the most gifted poets of her generation.

Stained glass: Poems PDF

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