Oberlin College Press

Angie Estes

VOICE-OVER Winner of the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-91-6)

Angie Estes' Voice-Over explores the erotics of language and its meanings in poems both experimental and lyric.

Reginald Shepherd, in awarding the collection the 2001 Alice Fay Di Castagnola prize, wrote that Estes' poems "enact the aural and thematic embodiment of letters and syllables, in which enunciation is a form of annunciation, and word play is serious work indeed."

"Angie Estes' stunning new collection of poems is a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page of this rich, compelling, and essential new book of poetry."
--David St. John

Angie Estes is also the author of Chez Nous.

SCRIPTURE

I'll tell you what is meant
on condition that it be
understood, what is lent on condition
that it be returned. Chartreuse,
first ruse of spring, liqueur
of the Carthusian monks at Grenoble,
is pale green, yellow as eggs

inside fresh hens in the markets
of Firenze each spring, pale
as the grappa from Piemonte
whose label, handwritten in red
and black ink on torn
paper reads Dear Maria,
I have to talk to you.

Le Corbusier's statue of Mary
in the chapel at Ronchamp
swivels to bless pilgrims inside
and out, but the effigy Ruskin found
on the tomb he climbed
in Santi Giovanni e Paolo
turned out to be only half

a Venetian doge: one hand, one
cheek, one side of the forehead
wrinkled, carved to be seen only
from below like the face
of the moon we can see
or the cameo, raised relief
of love. What is lent:

the curved throat
of the road, the deer
thrown back like the s
in swan: squirrel
flat on the asphalt, carnival
mask, its own black map
of what it means.

--Angie Estes