• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to footer

Martha Collins

Poet, Translator, Editor

  • About
    • Interviews
    • Hear Martha Read
    • News
  • Books
  • Events
  • Contact
  • Edited Books
  • Translation
  • Poetry
  • All Books

The Arrangement of Space

By Martha Collins

The Arrangement of Space
$9.95 (out of print)
  • Publisher: Gibbs Smith
  • Available in: Paperback
  • Published: September 1, 1991
Buy from Amazon

The Arrangement of Space, winner of the 1990 Peregrine Smith Poetry  Competition, is comprised of three poetic sequences.

Rich with lyric music and luminous with thought, The Arrangement of Space further establishes Martha Collins’ important role in American poetry. In her poems, dream and world, image and idea, sound and sense merge. This is the work of a poet blessed with a fierce intelligence and marked by a troubling imagination.

 

Martha Collins’ poems are excellent, musical, a little quirky, and endlessly fascinating. The Arrangement of Space will prove a durable and fascinating companion.” —Bill Matthews

Comprised of a narrative fragment called ‘Women in American Literature,’ 30 lyrics entitled ‘A Book of Days,’ and a series of six thematically linked ‘suites,’ Collins’s newest collection offers the reader an impressionistic overview of a poetic mind.”     —Publishers Weekly

This is a fine, disturbing, mature body of work, well worth reading and reading again.”     —Laurel Blossom,Small Press

In The Arrangement of Space, we move through a mystical and highly politicized landscape fraught with danger but also providing abrupt awakenings to hope. Martha Collins’s voice is a blade boring down to essence. It is brilliant, spare, and powerful.”      — Sojourner


 

from A Book of Days

 

8

Christmas Afternoon They've drained the old pond, they're digging it deeper. Two derricks face each other across the mud, stumps, rubble, brush, an oval of water, wrinkled like skin, that yesterday was rain. All right. I cried last night when the choir sang and almost cried when the brass band played in the almost April weather of late December. This morning not the want, but the wanting not. Across the street, wind chimes chime. On the other bank three small trees are growing together: an I, a Y, an intricate shape, a woman leaning into the wind, arms raised, breasts, straining against the limbs of the others, who hold her there. Everyone alive in the world is very nearly the same age. I am still the baby in that house.

 

22

In the rain, the bark of the plane trees shines
in the colors, the shapes of camouflage:
trees looking like men looking like trees.

When the sun shines, the trees shade
the grass a darker green, the thick veins
of giant leaves, a giant's hands—

Terrain with deep cracks, that old puzzle---

In California, it rained on the queen
and the president, it rained on the good
and the bad, it rained on me.

In the jungle, it rained, it has rained,
it rains on bodies fallen
like leaves, on bodies that walk—

In the rain, the shadows disappear.

In a larger rain, things are lost.

In the largest rains, borders emerge—

A puzzle coming apart, becoming the world.
Share:

Tagged with: Poetry

Footer

Upcoming Events

Mar 31
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm EDT

Forbes House Museum Reading with Anna VQ Ross

Apr 13
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm EDT

Middlesex Community College Poetry Reading

Apr 15
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm EDT

Quick Starts, Thoughtful Responses: In-person Poetry Workshop in Worcester, MA

View Calendar

Search



Join my email list

For updates on books, readings, and events.

Copyright © 2023 · Martha Collins · created by Present Tense

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT