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Epigraph
Passion is the element in which we live;
without it, we hardly even vegetate.
—Byron
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
Passing an Afternoon
Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.
Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.
It hurts.
Splashes on the pale gold tile,
bright red bursts like sunlight,
like exclamation points—Another Error!
I wrap a small towel around my wrist.
A small towel indicates a small error.
Soaked through
the towel's gold is tarnished.
There is an innocent joy in the blood's
flow that the towel and I cannot absorb.
These spurts, worth twenty dollars a pint
on the market, sense themselves unmarketable now.
Another towel wrapped tight in terror
slows everything down. On a blue velvet
love seat from which love has wandered I
sit waiting. I am an angel with an alert
backbone. I am purified from the business
of panic.
Reviews
Publishers Weekly, October 19, 1970, p52
Library Journal, March 1, 1971, p839
Prairie Schooner, Spring 1971, p78-80
Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1971, pcviii
Spirit, Fall 1972, p24-29
Washington Post Book World, August 25, 1974, p4
Revised Fri, Oct 30, 1998
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