The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems (Volume 15) (The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)

We are always in the middle of life, looking forwards and backwards; the only movement we can make to defy physics and history is the journey of the spirit. The Ishtar Gate, a ceremonial gate from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, reconstructed and housed in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, is my personal symbol for the merging of ancient and modern culture, the old goddess-centred religions and the scholarly, rational West. So wrote Diana Brebner of the book she planned to write. Though cancer claimed her life before she could complete this project, she wrote some thirty poems towards it.Here is a poet in extreme control of her craft: the aesthetic refinement, the musicality of language, the spiritual vision, and the playfulness that drew readers to Brebner's previous award-winning books - Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna - resonate with even greater force in her last poems. "Cancer claimed Diana Brebner's life before she could complete her last collection. The finished poems are gathered here for the first time, together with selections from her award-winning Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna. Elemental, elegant, and passionate, Brebner's last poems claim as their symbol the Ishtar Gate: a threshold between the past and the future, the old world and the new. Through this Babylonian gate we see a canoe on a northern lake, a scene from Vermeer, a line by Sylvia Plath, a Polaroid of a heart, a jar of orange marmalade, a frozen Aphrodite."--Résumé de l'éditeur "Cancer claimed Diana Brebner's life before she could complete her last collection. The finished poems are gathered here for the first time, together with selections from her award-winning Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna. Elemental, elegant, and passionate, Brebner's last poems claim as their symbol the Ishtar Gate: a threshold between the past and the future, the old world and the new. Through this Babylonian gate we see a canoe on a northern lake, a scene from Vermeer, a line by Sylvia Plath, a Polaroid of a heart, a jar of orange marmalade, a frozen Aphrodite."--Jacket The Ishtar Gate, a ceremonial gate from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, reconstructed and housed in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, is the merging of ancient and modern culture, old goddess-centred religions and the scholarly, rational West. This work testifies to the author's belief in the indefatigable forces of poetry and imagination. Diana Brebner ; Edited And With An Introduction By Stephanie Bolster.