Divine Ratios - by Jacqueline Osherow (Paperback)

About the Book

"The cities in Jacqueline Osherow's new collection of poems, Divine Ratios, include a Berlin still overwhelmed by guilt for World War II; a Shanghai where a taxi driver teaches his American passengers to recite a Tang Dynasty poem in Chinese; a Baltimore devastated by police violence, where women in a laundromat take in and guide a stranger; as well as Urbino, the quintessential ideal city of the Italian Renaissance. The book also visits natural wonders: the shapeshifting hoodoos of Utah's Bryce Canyon, the lupines and sandhill cranes of southwestern Montana, the coyotes adapting to life in New York City. Osherow's poems find their bearings through contrast, as a breezy conversational tone provides a counterpoint to traditional formal verse. Divine Ratios shows a distinguished American poet navigating spaces and forms with enrapturing insight, craft, and humanity"--

Book Synopsis

The reach of Divine Ratios is global, ranging from Tang Dynasty China and the Florentine Renaissance to contemporary Baltimore, post-World War II Berlin, and the landscapes of the Mountain West. The speed and mobility evoked in this new collection by Jacqueline Osherow are not only physical--a traveler's movement in a crowded, thrilling world--but imaginative, and its poetic idiom is no less varied, as a breezy conversational tone serves as a counterpoint to traditional form. With striking juxtapositions of natural and cultural wonders, this enrapturing volume asks, what is the right proportion--or "ratio"--for living in a world of such splendors, horrors, and possibilities?

Review Quotes

"Divine Ratios is proof that Osherow's ear remains an astonishing gift any poet writing in English would envy."--Jericho Brown

"In the poems of Divine Ratios, lyric form, like passionate intellection, becomes as natural as breathing. Jacqueline Osherow is splendidly intoxicated with the plenitude of the sensuous world and the history of humans making sense through art, and grants us privileged access to this abundant realm. She is a national treasure. We have no one like her."--Linda Gregerson

"There is such wisdom and music in all of Jacqueline Osherow's work, but I am especially partial to Divine Ratios, for these poems' expansive lyricism, their big-hearted cosmologies. . . . Boundless gratitude for these poems' music and deep generosity of spirit."--Ilya Kaminsky

About the Author

Jacqueline Osherow is the author of eight previous collections of poems. She has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation and was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.