Rough Fugue - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Betty Adcock (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Betty Adcock brings fierce insight to her seventh poetry collection, Rough Fugue. Her elegant stanzas evoke bygone moments of beauty, reflection, and rage. "Let things be spare," she writes, "and words for things be thin / as the slice of moon / the loon's cry snips." Adcock's poems are often spare but never thin, shifting effortlessly from the eerie red of brake lights on a Texas highway to the fluorescents of an office building where a tired worker imagines a holiday in Spain.

Adcock reflects upon her poetic forebears, chronicling the desire to write that led them to create cuneiform tablets, scrolls of papyrus, and ultimately vellum and parchment. She also recounts memories about the life with her late husband and tries to define herself in the bewildering new role of "widow." In poems ranging in tone from playful to reverential, Rough Fugue showcases the work of a veteran poet at her masterful best.

Review Quotes

After her husband's death, Betty Adcock learned 'to see in the dark.' This arresting new volume of poems contains light and dark, joy and sorrow, along with 'beautiful things / and the words that wake them.' In line after perfect line, Adcock revisits a history both personal and intensely universal, with unforgettable moments like the one on an empty winter porch where birdsong cuts 'the morning to gold ribbons' and makes readers listen more attentively to the 'rough fugue' of the world.--Peter Makuck

Betty Adcock's poems have always taken us instantly, elegantly, to a deeper, clearer mind and place of being. Uncluttered, resonantly perfect, visually impeccable--holding all that is both present and gone--Rough Fugue is a triumph of love and continuing.--Naomi Shihab Nye

Broadly speaking, these poems are about love and loss, grief and haunted memory, reflections on an earlier, inherited world commingled with a contemporary experience whose meaning resists easy claims. And yet there is always an ethereal quality lighting up this exhilarating book, whose focus is inevitable darkness. The light comes through in the occasional poems that rhyme and fall into rough meter. And that implies a belief that something meaningful is always coming round, a recurrent beauty, a recurring image to savor and test. Nothing in this book--which presents a mastery of craft and vision--is easy, and no one, the poet included, would want it otherwise. At the end of this personal and artistic struggle, however, unaccountably, is joy. And that is a just conclusion. This book reminds us again and again what poetry is for. What a humbling and quieting inspiration it is.--Maurice Manning

About the Author

Betty Adcock is the author of six previous books of poetry and the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Poets' Prize, the North Carolina Medal for Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Poetry, the Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She taught for twenty years at Meredith College and for ten years at the Warren Wilson MFA program for Writers.