"The Hoopoe's Crown"
from Jacqueline Osherow's
The Hoopoe's Crown

Jacqueline Osherow:

Jacqueline Osherow is the author of four previous books of poems: Dead Men's Praise(1999) and With a Moon in Transit (1996), both from Grove; and Conversations with Survivors (1993) and Looking for Angels in New York (1998), both from University of Georgia Press. Her work has appeared in many contemporary anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and has received the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Osherow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah. (Photo by Randy Madsen)

About The Hoopoe's Crown:

"No one but Osherow could tell us why there are no names of fish in the Torah, why Isaiah changed 'egret' to 'snow' in his search for the right white, or how, even in the desert, 'emptiness redeems itself with words...' Her words are balm, play, praise, argument, song – hers a contemporary, colloquial voice in scintillant, errant, delightful, and ardent conversation with the living past."
— Eleanor Wilner

"The mere page, only a leaflet on her terza rima pollard, is never a credible limit for the conversible poetry Osherow has long since devised and here consummated. For she is a singer of scrolls: once you allow these giddy, gaudy psalms (gorgeous, even in the desert – especially there) to beguile your senses, you cannot gainsay the good and garrulous company of a true heart, a worried mind, and an enraptured soul, all of which belong to our only I Jacqueline, accurate celebrant of what she calls 'horrors, miracles' and, I believe, the most heartening American poet alive."
— Richard Howard

"Jacqueline Osherow's new poems continue in the exuberant, chatty, freewheeling, prosodically sportive mode she has already made her own. 'Let me in, guys,' she demands of the Jewish medieval acrostic poets, wanting to join a tradition of ecstatic praise of the Almighty in which the praiser's name is quietly inscribed."
— Rosanna Warren

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