Diane Wakoski Click here to see other works by Diane Wakoski

Softcover, 348 pages ISBN: 0-87685-744-6 $18.95

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 by Diane Wakoski Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America   "Lyrical ... shocking ... sensual ... powerful ... steeped in domestic surrealism and personal mythology ... A fine introduction to a brilliant and accomplished poet."  —San Francisco Chronicle   "Wakoski strives for a voice that is wholly natural, spontaneous, and direct. She avoids all fixed forms ... in the drive to tell us the Whole Truth about herself, to be sincere."   —Marjorie Perloff In 1988, at the age of fifty, Diana Wakoski selected the poems in Emerald Ice from her first sixteen books of poetry. Here, returned to print at last, are all the famous (and infamous) lyrics, series, and narratives that established Wakoski as a mythologizer of sex and self, a fierce free-verse imagist, and one of the most important and controversial poets to come out of California in the 1960s. About these poems, Wakoski writes: “My themes are loss, justice, truth, transformation, the duality of the world, the possibilties of magic, and the creation of beauty out of ugliness. My language is dramatic, oral, and as American as I can make it. I am impatient with stupidity, bureaucracy, and organizations. Poetry, for me, is the supreme art of the individual using language to show how special, different, and wonderful his perceptions are. With verve and finesse. With discursive precision. And with utter contempt for pettiness of imagination or spirit.” Emerald Ice is a contemporary classic, the essential poems of a uniquely American female sensibility.