Partridge - The If Borderlands

Elise Partridge The If Borderlands Collected Poems NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York Photograph: Stephen Partridge E LISE P ARTRIDGE (19582015) was born in Philadelphia and grew up nearby. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, she received a second Bachelor of Arts from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar. She returned to Harvard for a Master of Arts and then took a degree in writing from Boston University. In 1992 she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she lived with her husband, a teacher of medieval literature, for the rest of her life. She taught writing and literature at several universities. Chameleon Hours (2008) won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2009, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize that year. Chameleon Hours (2008) won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2009, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize that year.

Her third book, The Exiles Gallery, was published in 2015. Partridges work has been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Slate, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, PN Review, and Poetry Ireland Review.

T HIS VOLUME includes poems from three books: Fielders Choice (Vhicule, 2002), Chameleon Hours (Anansi and University of Chicago, 2008), and The Exiles Gallery (Anansi, 2015). The University of Chicago Press edition of Chameleon Hours also included thirty-one poems from Fielders Choice, a number of which Elise revised to some degree for their reprinting there. While this book follows the contents and order of all three books as they were published in Canada, it follows the revised versions, where they exist, of poems from Fielders Choice that Chicago published in its Chameleon Hours. Elise asked that the content of the present collection not extend far beyond those three books.

From a set of around twenty poems, consisting of those she had published in journals but not in any of her books, together with some unpublished poems removed in the last stages of preparation from The Exiles Gallery, I have chosen the seven additional poems that appear here. In making these choices, I drew on the advice of others who know her work especially well. Bird Singing at 3:30 a.m., Earth Day first appeared in The New Quarterly; Seek and... in The Fiddlehead; A Suicide in Tennessee Review; Algaed Stones: Prayer in Canadian Literature. Elise revised Bird Singing at 3:30 a.m., Earth Day for Chameleon Hours but ultimately removed it from the typescript of that book; that revised form is published here. The poems in Fielders Choice were written over a period of more than twenty years.

Four Lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977, based on notes Elise took in Lowells last classes at Harvard, was published in The New Republic before she graduated from college. Ways of Going and The Book of Steve reflect her diagnosis with breast cancer, for which she underwent treatment in 200102 and which did not recur. Most of the poems in Chameleon Hours, even those not directly responding to that experience, were written after her diagnosis, though the second book includes a handful of poems that existed in some version at the time she was preparing Fielders Choice. Similarly, The Exiles Gallery includes a few poems that in earlier versions were considered for Chameleon Hours, and she began writing and in some cases publishing others as early as 2008. Several reflect our experience living in New York for much of 2013, such as The Exiles Home Gallery and Citydwellers (both inspired by the apartment we rented from a retired Italian academic), Fifth and Seventieth, and Italian Fifteenth-Century Double Wedding Portrait. The summer of 2013 was an especially productive period for Elise, when much of The Exiles Gallery took shape.

It was then, for example, that she brought A Late Writers Desk, based on notes taken a few years before, into something close to its final form, and mentioned the possibility of dedicating it to the memory of Seamus Heaney after his death in August. In early 2014, Elise was diagnosed with colon cancer at a terminal stage, and a few poems such as Gifts and Invitation reflect that diagnosis; she had begun Terminal some time before but finished it in her last year. It was also during a burst of work in March and April that Elise first showed me a number of the poems, such as Tree, Meth, and Astrolabe, that appeared in The Exiles Gallery, the final version of which she prepared in the months of August through October. She returned proofs to Anansi in mid- January 2015, a couple of weeks before her death. While commentary on Elises work has understandably paid considerable attention to how it responds to her medical history, at least two other aspects of her biography may be mentioned here. As many as ten of her poems, from all three books, concern her experiences at the Baldwin School near Philadelphia and the lifelong friendships that grew from them.

In addition, from 2002 to 2012, we were able to spend time each summer on Salt Spring Island, where Elise could work in concentrated fashion on her poetry and discover material for such poems as Hummingbird Koan and Snail Halfway Across the Road, as well as Invitation and A Late Writers Desk. Stephen Partridge

Landscape with Christ and Two Disciples on the Road to Emmaus (c. 1535), which hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is by Herri met de Bles (c. 1485c. 1550), a landscape painter who often portrayed biblical scenes in contemporary Flemish settings. The poem used as an epigraph is Seeing Off Yuan Er on a Mission to Anhsi by Wang Wei, translated by Red Pine.

It is included in Poems of the Masters: Chinas Classic Anthology of Tang and Sung Dynasty Verse (2003), and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. This is a found poem, with all lines taken or slightly adapted from Arabia Felix by Thorkild Hansen (New York: NYRB, 2017). Anything vertical to the horizon wants to fall. Were just helping it. Doug Loizeaux, owner of a demolition business that popularized the term implosion. The information about structures in stanza three is also taken from comments by Loizeaux.

Szabolcs Kri, a psychologist at Semmelweis University in Hungary, and his researchers devised a test to determine volunteer subjects creativity; the test used prompts such as What if clouds had strings? This poem adapts a translation by Richard Hamer of A Charm in his A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 www.nyrb.com Copyright 2002, 2008, 2015, 2017 by Elise Partridge Fielders Choice was originally published in 2002 by Signal Editions, Vhicule Press, Montral; Chameleon Hours was originally published in 2008 and The Exiles Gallery in 2015 by House of Anansi Press, Toronto, www.houseofanansi.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Partridge, Elise, 1958-2015, author. Title: The if borderlands : collected poems / Elise Partridge. Description: New York City : New York Review Books, 2017. | POETRY / Canadian. | POETRY / Canadian.