Pyre

These “feral elegies,” spacious, experimental and abstract, spark and inflame language. They splinter, oxygenate. Alsop’s kindling: voices, mineral in absence. The poems delve into collaborations invented in life and life beyond. Through metaphor, the collection evocatively sculpts a new metaphysics—thumbed in ash, cinder’s smudge, as embers glow from grief’s breath. Here, a prophetic moon emerges in cyclical écriture féminine, this series of meditations combust, twine unspoken cords, and pause only in arcs of imagination as remedy.
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Praise for Pyre

“Populated with ghosts, moths, tongues, and blades, and delivered in chiaroscuro contrast, Alsop’s poems are feral elegies. Structured around selenomancy, Pyre maps a constellation of grief, longing, and beauty: it is both funereal and communal as Alsop provides tribute to dead friends while celebrating the spirit of collaboration with other women artists. Constantly shepherding language into illuminating arrangements, she reminds us that one way to address the losses that gather inside us—‘the ghost inside our ghost’—is to ‘set a lantern upon the wet grass’ and sing, even if with a blackened tongue.”
—Simone Muench, author of Lampblack & Ash and Wolf Centos

“There’s a weather and a whether here: clouds passing over constellations, questions. Poetry can be prose but this book is not; this book is language played as competition in an open field, pausing and lifting its skirts to show off. I loved reading this game, puzzling and speaking shiny, shattering sentences. This is poetry, what poetry can do and do best: make language new again. Make seeing challenging. Blurry beauty inspires gravity. Like landing on the moon: new worlds.”
—Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn

"‘Every sacred language,’ writes Octavio Paz, ‘is secret. And conversely: every secret language … borders on the sacred.’ In the liminal Pyre, poet Maureen Alsop traverses – and erodes – this secret/sacred border, which is also the border of life and death, ‘the valley between our language’ (‘North Channel’). Each of the book’s section titles is a variation on ‘Selenomancy’, defined on the contents page as ‘a divination by the observation of the phases and appearances of the moon’. That Alsop titles multiple poems ‘Sky An Oar’, moreover, betrays the purpose of these divinations: to reach the other side, the ‘village across the waters’ that ‘burned all night’ (‘Witness’). The collection’s challenge, which it mostly meets successfully, is to remain on the compelling side of hermeticism."
—Anders Villani, Australian Book Review