Tenderness Shore
2002

Meredith Stricker’s Tenderness Shore is a fierce and luminous collection of poetry that explores the iconography of the Muse as a wilderness retreat for the imagination. Opening with a series of exchanges with Sappho-Plato’s “tenth muse”-in letters, shopping lists, postcards, choreography, and maps, the delving into the landscape of Lesbos using a lexicon to track the roots and impulses of lyrics, the collection closes with encounters among a chorus of muses: Sappho, Camus, Piaf, and birds speaking in Hungarian. Tenderness Shore affirms that the Muse, or the human capacity to muse, can be found in any part of life-nature, photographs, art, memory-that resists being measures in terms of profit and loss.

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