A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
ISBN: 9781556596957
Format: Paperback
Rain and Stars
A person can be removed. All evidence
points to it. And in the space
left behind—
It rained all night.
A heavy, even rain that added to the pond.
Now there are tiny fish
scissoring in the blackness.
New alphabets, not encased in anything—
these ripples of emergence,
silver darts
in a withdrawing sky.
Reviews
“After Image by Jenny George is intense and controlled and delicate, a study of character and narrative. There are mythological Greek characters presented minus the heroism, deaths that rebirth in language, and repetition of these worlds: ‘The story ends / with a wedding. Then everyone endures.’ Such strong lines make familiar images feel estranged and big statements about ‘the world’ feel wholly true. In this evocative collection, the self willingly recedes and the bees, in hope, abound.”—Poetry Northwest
“Splendid, subtle, nuanced, but ultimately punch-packed. . . . Her temperament is different from that of [someone like Robert] Lowell, more formal, quieter, often on the down-low, yet the sting is equally deep and lasting.”—Johnny Payne, Merion West
“George refuses to sensationalize or capitalize her private feelings; she eschews, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, the temptation to make a career of her pain. Perhaps for this reason, the suffering in the poems is all the more exquisitely felt. . . . The voicings of these poems are an attempt to conjure and reconstitute the beloved lost body and all that went with it. It is an act of after image, of bodying forth an absence through imagined ‘things’ and keening song.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, Adroit Journal
“The liminal space between life and death provides the geography for George’s new collection, After Image, in which the real-life death of her long-term partner vivifies the everyday landscape with beauty, grief and yearning.”—Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter
“The poems are striking for their immediacy and apparent simplicity. . . . A spectacular book.”—David Starkey, California Review of Books
“When entering Jenny George’s third collection, you’ll feel as though you’ve stepped into a still-life. . . . After Image is surreal, unnerving, and filled with longing.”—Turi Sioson, Only Poems