Smaller Songs ~ by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Smaller Songs ~ by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
*** INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING AVAILABLE! Please email us at info@stbrigidpress.net for shipping outside of the US! ***
What news can a ballad tell? And what news is hidden in the footnotes to a 1957 edition of English and Scottish ballads? Anna Lena Phillips Bell's Smaller Songs carries strange and delightful tidings, in poems made entirely from word and phrase banks transcribed from the footnotes of English and Scottish Ballads, edited by Robert Graves. Glosses on words and phrases from ballads such as “The Golden Vanitie,” “The Demon Lover,” and “The Unquiet Grave” are rendered new in Bell's poems, which upend ideas of gender and power embedded in the originals. By turns epigrammatic, enigmatic, and wryly funny, these smaller songs sing fiercely of wonders within and without.
This limited edition letterpress chapbook is hand-set in Goudy Old Style metal type (cast by Patrick Reagh) and printed on a 1909 Golding Pearl foot-treadled press. Four woodcut illustrations by Molly Stouten and an original song-sheet by Allen Phillips Bell accompany the poems. The chapbook is hand-sewn, with a handmade paper jacket by St Armand.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized guide to poetic forms. The recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, she teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near the Cape Fear River, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond. You can read "Songs of the Garden," a sequence from Smaller Songs that first appeared in Quarterly West, at poets.org.
“Smaller Songs, and indeed they are—short sweet bits of poetry borrowed from old ballads, that instantly paint a picture and strike a familiar note—to be read over and over again. “First, housewifely tasks; then, / much ale” and “Defied book-knowledge— / taught the garden” were two of my favorites among many. The lovely woodcuts by Molly Stouten are a perfect accompaniment to this wonderful little book.”
“Like the best fiddle and banjo duets, Bell’s poems are both simple and complex, breezy and profound, powerful and authentic. . . . Here is a living artist who, through passion, talent, and caring about craft, is able to take us inside the music.”
Header Photo: Dancers on Halliehurst Porch, Augusta Old-Time Week, Elkins, West Virginia, August 2006, by Mary Ann Daly. Used with permission.