Granite Dives

$12.00 paper | 76 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-932826-88-6
Publication Date: April 2000
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In this book poems about motherhood and domesticity mingle with poems about love and nature, most of them formal, all of them crystalline and full of an odd, bumpy vernacular sense of voice. Whimsical and urgent in turn, the style is the subject in Granite Dives, and indeed one hears echoes of Stevens, but also A. R. Ammons, whose nuanced syntactical tightrope-walking Rabb has somehow managed to appropriate without imitating. And, like Ammons, Rabb has an ability to cast a cold and objective eye at the natural world, letting the particulars rise through language that lightens the spirit, amazingly, with its breathless and (seemingly) effortless ability to capture in words the sense of the human spirit in flight.

“This is a wise and mischievous book. ‘Dropping in at The Mothers of Twins Club,’ following retirees around Pompeii, standing in the stillness of Chartres, Margaret Rabb offers the companionship of a sharp, generous fellow traveler. She is a master of incantation, stories, jokes, meditation –– and always, always the language, which she weaves in astonishing ways, almost as if it were light.”
—Jeanne Murray Walker

“These are poems of high intelligence and formal beauty. Never straining for effect, they pour forth their music in a crystal stream.”
—Carolyn Kizer

Margaret Rabb

Margaret Rabb was the author ofGranite Dives and three chapbooks: Figments of the Firmament, Old Home, andGreatest Hits: Margaret Rabb 1995-2007. Her work was published in such journals asCarolina Quarterly, Georgetown Review, Literal Latte, The Madison Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She was the director of the Creative Writing Program at Wichita State University.