Green Island - by Liz Countryman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poems that enlarge our sense of what beauty and awe can be.

The poems in Green Island delve into the relationship between place and imagination, examining the ways in which the physical places the speaker occupies, remembers, and imagines determine and enlarge her understanding of self.

While operating with startling self-awareness, Green Island does not simply offer poems that interrogate the circumstances of their own making. The work found in this slim volume questions the poetic tropes of beauty and romantic love and their relationships to the lyric. Ultimately working within the confines of a received tradition to expand what is possible within it, Liz Countryman shows us moments of quiet revelation in the quotidian, the comic, and in the vestiges of popular culture.

Review Quotes

"Green Island is a collection to savor, to read and re-read a line or lines, not only to follow the speaker's journey through time, but also to reflect on one's own life: present, past and future."-- "Arthur Turfa's Bookshelf"

"Green Island is a collection made up of seventeen poems set in two clusters on either side of a longer sequence. Throughout the collection, I'm intrigued at how each of [Countryman's] poems stretch to articulate the length and breadth of a landscape, both internal and external."-- "rob mclennan's blog"

"A book of field poetics evoking proximal learning and deep ecology, Green Island stages motherhood, memory, and mind as overlapping forces of situated, embodied consciousness."-- "Virginia Konchan, Harriet"

"In Green Island, Liz Countryman's beautifully perceptive and formally adventurous second book, she investigates how a 'commitment to a disoriented wonderment, ' like an 'arrogant fog, ' had once 'obscured the physical reality of what passed.' In doing so, Countryman does not give up surprise and 'wonderment' nor disorientation so much as she finds them in 'undiscovered' places as near at hand as an 'embrace' or when placing a 'kiss [on] the inside of a turtleneck.'"
--Michael Collier

"Liz Countryman's powers of description remind me of both Virginia Woolf and Bernadette Mayer: she looks at the ordinary through the lens of history, seeing in a dresser, a seashore, a clearing the necessary and ruthless work that is time. She sees the past always staring back, and the challenge of her poems is to make a more meaningful life out of, and despite, the losses and failures of that past--the twentieth century, hers and ours. I am in awe of the masterful poise of these poems--insistently gendered, often wry, always wise, full of grief and fearless confrontation and full of the poet's 'desire to be lifted.' Green Island is a devastating book and a beautiful book, and it is a book to hold close and read again."
--Jennifer Chang

"You come out of a cave into a forest. Within the forest you find a clearing. The clearing opens onto a lake. The lake, you realize, is the ocean. Though you can't see it, you know that in the middle of this ocean there's a green island. It's called Green Island. Your father had the t-shirt. You can see it in your mind because you were there. Or you were it, you were Green Island. You aspired to be. You don't any more. But you remember the aspiration. This memory of an aspiration is a private map of who you were. Liz Countryman's Green Island is the map of who you are now."
--Paul Killebrew

About the Author

Liz Countryman teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina and co-edits the annual poetry journal Oversound. She is the author of one previous collection, A Forest Almost. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, and The Canary