The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

Poems

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by Mary Jo Bang

University of Georgia Press

Due/Published April 2001, 63 pages, paper

ISBN 082032292X

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world.Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places—inside and outside the human psyche.