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NECESSARY ANGELS

NECESSARY ANGELS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9762114-5-7

Pub Date: Spring 2006

Pages: 80


By Carolyn Maisel


Necessary Angels, Carolyn Maisel’s second book of poetry, is actually two new books in a single volume— Pig Woman, written in the 1970s, and Light and Shadow, completed just before her death in 2006.


Carolyn Maisel’s poems are spoken by a sort of gnostic angel whose impulse is always to describe the indescribable, to say what cannot be said. The remarkable blend of passion and concision such poems required, the discipline they embody mark Maisel as a masterful poet. How fortunate we are to have had her lustrously imaginative spirit among us, and to have, now, this beautiful book.

--- Christopher Howell


    Carolyn Maisel—admired by Marvin Bell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many of America’s finest poets—has kept vigil on a fearsome landscape reminiscent of the Southern gothic vein in American fiction. An introvert, intimate in emotion, rather like Akhmatova, Maisel charts this eerie terrain with cool monastic grace, a cartographer of the known interlaced with astonishing half-glimpsed, unknown things. She loved “this green planet” intensely, but was curious about what might lie on the other side.

    —Lynn Strongin


    Carolyn Maisel was born in Mississippi in 1942 and lived much of her life in Louisiana. She received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Iowa and taught briefly at the University of New Orleans. Her poems were widely published in journals and magazines, including The New Yorker and The North American Review; and, in 1978, L’Epervier Press published Witnessing, her only other full length collection of poems. During 1985 she was poet Laureate of Louisiana. Carolyn Maisel died in March, 2006, in Austin, Texas, after a brief battle with lung cancer.

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