The Descent

This book of poems, Sophie Cabot Black's anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent.

The voices of (and in) these poems struggle through the hesitancies of doubt and loss to end at more than survival or witness; they achieve clarity by singing of the resiliencies of the known world, after paradise inevitably fails. In such spare, lyric outcries, Black affirms her place as one of America's most spiritually meaningful and ecstatically crafted contemporary poets.

Praise

"Sophie Cabot Black's poems, in their measured grace, have a quiet intensity, animated by her passion for a clarity of understanding, in the art as in the life."—Stanley Kunitz

"Black's voice is startling, jagged, and implacable, and The Descent is steep, precipitous, and dazzling—all the way down from a hard-earned heaven."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"I have admired Sophie Cabot Black's poems for a long time, but this new book amazes me; I am amazed by such primal sincerity, such necessity-driven authenticity. Something has asked her to awake to and endure a revelation—that the outer and inner worlds are one and the same place; clearly, she has obeyed, and she has done so with true passion, dread, humility, and ecstasy. And in some of these poems, such as the almost unbearably poignant 'Birthday,' she has achieved a quiet greatness."—Franz Wright

About the Author(s)

Sophie Cabot Black

Sophie Cabot Black's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her first collection of poems, The Misunderstanding of Nature, received the Poetry Society of America's 1994 Norma Farber First Book Award. She teaches at Columbia University.