A dazzling story of obsessive love emerges in Cynthia Zarin�s luminous new book inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokov�s novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, who was the lifelong love of her half brother, Van. These electric poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things�the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies�collide with the speaker�s own protean tale of desire and loss. With a string of brilliant contemporary sonnets as its spine, the book is a headlong display of mastery and sorrow: in the opening poem, �Birch,� the poet writes �Abide with me, arrive / at its skinned branches, its arms pulled / from the sapling . . . the birch all elbows, taking us in.� But Zarin does not �Destroy and forget� as Nabokov�s witty, tender Ada would have her do; rather, as she writes in �Fugue: Pilgrim Valley,� �The past�s / clear colors make the future dim, Lethe�s / swale lined with willow twigs.� Like all enduring love poetry, these poems are a gorgeous refusal to forget. A riveting, high-stakes performance by one of our major poets, The Ada Poems extends the reach of American poetry.
(less)A dazzling story of obsessive love emerges in Cynthia Zarin�s luminous new book inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokov�s novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, who was the lifelong love of her half brother, Van.
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The Ada Poems | 
