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A meditation on art’s longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.
Jessica Fisher brings “the faraway close,” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each “day” is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.
In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time is also a tether, rendering violence, beauty, grief, and art separate merely by a matter of days. “So you see once again,” she writes, “violence is to beauty / as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath.”
Like the fresco itself, Daywork is committed to a time- and site-specific art, and to the daily work of creation. At once an elegiac meditation and a brave unearthing, this book expertly discerns the monumentalizing portrayals of history and its violences, while boldly illuminating other crucial accounts of everyday existence.
Praise for Daywork
"[Daywork is] poetry as bracingly lyric as it is refreshing. [. . .] This is the voice of poetry: the voice of a beloved speaking beside you.”—Jesse Nathan, Poetry Society of America
“The fine poems of Daywork are, in the tracework they invite, in their persistent awareness of these edges, constantly revealing.”—West Branch Review
Praise for Jessica Fisher
“Poetry’s distinction as a form centers on its capacity to mesmerize and haunt. Jessica Fisher’s extraordinary poems possess these qualities to a rare degree. She is, simultaneously, a fastidious, discriminating intelligence and a seer, a spell maker; her poems are, quite simply, among the most memorable poems of her generation.”—Judge’s citation for the Rome Fellowship in Literature, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
“Her poems are analytic meditations, their variety and beauty manifestations of extraordinary sensitivity to English syntax.”―Louise Glück, author of The Wild Iris
Praise for Inmost
“What strikes me most profoundly, reading Fisher’s beautiful, formally experimental second book in tandem with Bogan’s Dark Summer, is how much the idea and fact of the mother—the absent mother, the longed-for mother, the admired mother, the terrified and terrifying mother, the loving mother—stalks the work of both women.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, LA Review of Books
“Fisher is a writer of rare agility and grace. Her poems often move through ideas, form, and language with a singular restrained gesture. It is through these gestures that she manages to find something like a balance to the conflicts deeply rooted in Inmost. ‘We say mortar both for the shell and what it struck, brick & or stone &.’ Language is the site of her exploration, the gauzey space where the daughter becomes a mother, or where the body gives birth. It is a place of multiple meanings, and so of course a place of puns, ‘Immanent or emanant.’ It is the way we move through thought and the way our movement is restricted. ‘A month or a region, something you pass through. The roads on either side impassable, otherwise of course one would have chosen a different route.’ And it is in that movement that Fisher stays, not arriving or departing but seeing what happens if the language is taken for all its meanings. It is a dangerous place to be, and it is where we are.”—T Fleischmann, Rumpus
Praise for Frail-Craft
“Reading Jessica Fisher’s first collection of poetry is like wandering through a garden of forking paths that at times give suddenly, astonishingly, onto the sea. . . . Extraordinary. . . . These poems are reminders of how great a burden their frail craft can bear.”—Boston Review
Shadow Play 1
1
Hinge 5
Camera Obscura 6
Peal 8
Origin 10
Daywork 11
In the Dream 13
Lyric 14
Daybook 15
Paleography 19
The Slaughter of the Innocents, 1376 20 Morality Play 24
Triptych 25
Spolia 26
2
Parable 29 Hive 32
Speedwell 33
Rapt 36
The Voice 37
Native 38
The Match Girl 39
Dark Cryptic 40
Il Viaggiatore 41
New Year 45
Early Spring 46
3
Dear Friend Night Song 59
Roundabout 62
After Empire 64
Sunset Corner 68
Thrall 70
Listen 77
Notes 79 Acknowledgments 81