“No poet of her generation can match Christina Pugh’s sheer lyricism.”
—Peter Campion
BOOKS
Grains of the Voice
READ | “Inflection” ▪︎ The Atlantic
READ | “Material” ▪︎ The Atlantic
READ | “As Tears” ▪︎ Verse Daily
AWARDS & HONORS for Grains of the Voice
Christina Pugh’s poem “I and Thou,” from Grains of the Voice, won the 2008 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, for a poem on a humanitarian theme, from the Poetry Society of America. Timothy Donnelly was the judge. Read “I and Thou” and Donnelly’s judge’s citation here.
A pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations
Christina Pugh’s Grains of the Voice exhibits a pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations. The human voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds—all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occasion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems are eclectic in their allusiveness, filled with echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of songs both popular and obscure, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. But Pugh always wears her learning lightly. Beneath the jewellike surfaces of her poems is a strenuous investigation of the nature of and need for communication and a celebration of the endless variety of its forms.
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Grains of the Voice
by Christina Pugh
Length: 96 pages
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication date: April 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0810152281 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0810166516 (ebook)
paperback | ebook
Available where all fine books are sold.
Reviews
“No poet of her generation can match Christina Pugh’s sheer lyricism. I mean not only her gift for writing precise and beautiful lines and sentences—though the poems in Grains of the Voice are so fine that you could use them to cut glass—but also Pugh’s passionate intelligence, her ability to carve shapes from language that promise to endure, even as they remain open to the unknown and the incomplete, and even as they reveal that vulnerability from which song derives in the first place. T.S. Eliot wrote of the metaphysical poets that they could ‘feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’ He might as well have been describing the poems in this superb book.”
—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
“Christina Pugh is a master of voice, its shades and swayings, and a superb shaper of sound and argument. In Grains of the Voice she shows herself a world-making poet, and presides over her creation with a fine, pressing energy.”
—David Mikics, coauthor of The Art of the Sonnet (with Stephanie Burt)
“Christina Pugh’s a serious poet, very smart, very gifted, & very passionate. Original work.”
—Philip Levine, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of The Last Shift
“Christina Pugh’s poems in Grains of the Voice are stunning in their complexity and force. . . . This collection is, in essence, an act of singing. Each poem lilts, echoes, trills what has come before so that by the end one feels that the book has sung itself and that you, the reader, are part of its song.”
—Kristin George Bagdanov, Colorado Review