Contents

Dust-Jacket Blurb

In this third volume of poetry, Joyce Carol Oates offers her readers another experience of her uniquely personal—and therefore universal—vision. The poems vary in subject from nightmares and city graveyards to "domestic miracles" and the family, but each of them is controlled by a sense of human struggle.

But Angel Fire is not merely a collection of poems. In terms of emotional and then mystical experience, it is a kind of lyric novella, in which poems are arranged to dramatize the evolution of a mind. Thus, the "struggle" gives way to the vision that there is no real struggle, only confused perception, and the concluding poems become revelations.

Excerpt

The Nightmare

She wakes from the pillow
body hammering to the hovering
above her
the withheld beating of wings

don't move

it is a whisper
she can't quite hear
she goes rigid with its certainty
a child's fatal sense
of proportion
don't move

a careless move will unhinge
the universe

in a network of nerves like wires
she lies rigid waiting
for the presence to withdraw
for the withdrawal of the vibrating
of dim sacred words passing
the noise of terror passing
the amorous wings fading
to daylight

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