Civil Twilight

The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fascination with the possibilities that exist at every moment and the human urge to resist the inevitable and keep those possibilities open. The language of these poems is personal and precise, attuned to the mind and the ear, and, with each line, readers are reminded of the perilous nature of our existence here on earth and of the joys our lives hold.

Margot Schilpp

Margot Schilpp's poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Fundación Valparaí so (Spain), she lives in Connecticut with her husband, Jeff Mock, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.

Reviews

What a splendid lamination of paradoxes Margot Schilpp brings to The World's Last Night. She means to include everything, to sacrifice neither temperament nor resolve, neither craft nor wildness. She is a poet of supreme lyrical delicacy, yet the bold is her mainstay. Such fusion in a lesser poet might seem merely ambitious, but for Schilpp, it is a signature of character. She is one of the finest young poets writing today.

—Rodney Jones

The abiding interest of these poems are memory and the difficulty of making a self. I read this book as an emotional narrative, the details of the poet's life less important than the spirit in which they are rendered. It's Schilpp's lyrical imagination that I'm most drawn to here: I can feel her, in poem after poem, creating a reality that is shaped most of all by beauty. The poems succeed because they show her struggling to redeem her past. It's a testament to her ability as a poet that I know myself better having read this book. These are beautiful, quietly powerful poems.

—Bob Hicok

Ordering Information

To purchase Civil Twilight by Margot Schilpp, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.