Flying Blind: Poems - Paperback

by Sharon Bryan (Author)

Sharon Bryan's third collection reveals a clever, ironically detached curiosity about how human beings mediate experience through language. Whatever personal emotions underlie these witty, deftly-crafted poems are transcended by Byran's rationalism and her focus on how we have 'invented words to keep the world / just out of reach.'--Poetry

Reading the poems of Flying Blind] is like watching a trapeze artist suspended between one flying bar and another, framed by the essential element of air. I found myself laughing, delighting in Sharon Bryan's original turn of mind, spinning on her surface wit. And I found myself saddened by a generalized sense of loss that incorporates my own. At the deepest level, Sharon Bryan's terrain resides in each of us.-The Georgia Review

The finely crafted, intelligent poems in Bryan's third collection concern the relationships or perceived relationships between life and death, the living and the dead, and, more urgently, our struggles to communicate on the subject. . . . These poems require bravery, compassion, and patience, for they are difficult, painful, and not always self-disclosing. Their deeply personal literary and spiritual drama is at times prayerful, at times macabre, and at times almost celebratory.-poetry calendar

Flying Blind is Sharon Bryan's third collection of poems. The first two, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, were published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton, 1993). Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Back Jacket

Sharon Bryan's new collection pays elegant homage to language. Arranged alphabetically, Flying Blind will appeal to anyone who appreciates the sobering effect of a good pun as well as the static jolt of sudden consciousness. Her poems are like riddles: irreverent, irrepressible, precocious and playful. But as much fun as she clearly has with words, they are, in the final analysis, no joke. Like Dickinson, Bryan is fascinated by language and obsessed by death; her poems are generated from the friction of the two. "I wanted these poems to dance as well as to sing, to whistle as they pass the graveyard ..".