After Cocteau

Poetry. In the title poem of this collection, based on a scene from Jean Cocteau's 1946 film La Belle et la Bete, Beauty's father falls asleep in the castle of the Beast, although the room he dozes in is alive with magic. The poems in AFTER COCTEAU are testaments to the miracles that surround us, from the natural world to the world of art. The book's narrative arc moves from California to the Missouri Ozarks and back to the coast again. Along the way, we meet other travelers on the "dark path" Amelia Earhart, an aging cat, Salvador Dali. The book ends with a meditation on the water-lily paintings of Monet, and the way in which art and nature reconcile us to the mingled joy and grief of our existence.

First sentence: Lupine, for example: its dry Mediterranean clinging to the hills, its gray-green furry pods, its beaked flowers like a woman's genitalsthe wide banners and small wings and the closed, smooth keelthe love of bees for it, the private smell of lupine flesh, the fishlike glimmer of its yellow heart, the deep blue blossoms strung on stems above the blue-gray palmate leaves like flocks of small, inten

Year

2002

Language

English

Publisher

Sixteen Rivers Pr

Editions

1

Pages

96

ISBN

9780970737038

Data source: Wikidata