Mary Jo Bang

Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters

Idioma: inglés

Traducciones: alemán (Frau Herbst und ihre zwei Töchter)

Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters

We live in an ocean
of white waiting to fall.
One of m is not like our mother and it's me. It's I.
My eyes are mostly closed.

My mother knows
how to make snow. We never see
our feet. Our skirts end in the oncoming frost.
My sister wears ermine. I have a narrow waist.

I no longer curl my hair. Why bother?
I love my sister but hate my mother
yet we're ail of a piece.
Endless snipsnip. Ragged fragment.

We still live where you last left us—
between the palace where you keep your winter
and the summer garden of the ersatz emperor.
Did I hear you say China? If I did you are right.

We live atop the continent
that contains such poverty. Such pollution.
Such eerie beauty. Always a mountain.
Always a screen. White washes

over me. I do not act
like my mother. I lean farther.
What I make annihilates the mirror of China
but not the mountain.

Not the man walking away.
My mother says throw more snow but I can't
help thinking.
There is more to being than erasure.

You are wrong, she says. You don't wear your cape.

Mary Jo Bang

* 22.10.1946, Ferguson, Estados Unidos
Vive en: St. Louis, Estados Unidos

The poet Mary Jo Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri where she is working at Washington University as a professor of English and as the director of the Creative Writing Program. She was awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, such as a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship in 1997, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. Her poems got published in various magazines like the New York Times, the Harvard Review, the New American Writing and in several anthologies like Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Pushcart Prize. In 2007 she received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Elegy, which was estimated by the New York Times to be one of the most important books of the year. She was the poetry co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005.

Bang contrasts in her poems a glamorous, American world with the dark regions of human existence, full of existential threat, emotional uncertainty and insatiable longing. She questions for instance the complex relation of modern media and human perception.

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