Bernice Ames — Where the Light Bends and Later Poems
Bernice Ames made poems by looking until ordinary things changed pressure: a deer half visible in trees, children’s laughter felt as light, a palm caught in cold illumination, red rock holding a loop of sky. Her first two books move from rhyme and domestic occasion toward the more open, sharply cut forms of Antelope Bread, while the later magazine poems return to family landscape, Southwestern travel, and the strange work of seeing. The life behind them was active and public. Ames raised three children, published short fiction as well as poetry, led Southern California writers’ groups and workshops, studied in England on a fellowship, and won the Poetry Society of America’s James Joyce and Cecil Hemley awards. Her record has often been confused with those of other women named Bernice Ames; this edition restores her correct identity as Bernice Mayabelle Olds Ames. It resets all 133 titled poems and sequences in her three books and adds eight later or otherwise uncollected poems available in complete witnesses. Original book order, divisions, lineation, dedications, and poem sequences are retained; scan noise and unmistakable typographical damage are removed.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Ames, Bernice. Where the Light Bends. Wagon & Star Press, 1955.
———. In Syllables of Stars. Golden Quill Press, 1958.
———. “If Matter Is Me.” Southwest Review, vol. 46, no. 4, autumn 1961, p. 310.
———. “Living Stone.” Poetry Northwest, vol. 3, no. 1, spring 1962, p. 40.
———. Antelope Bread. Alan Swallow, 1966.
———. “New Shoes.” Arizona Quarterly (spring 1967). Short story; journal award winner.
———. “A Fragile Holding.” University Review, summer 1969, p. 9.
———. “She Leans from Herself.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 43, no. 3, fall 1969, pp. 314–15.
———. “Crabapple Harvest.” The Georgia Review, vol. 25, no. 4, winter 1971, pp. 499–500.
———. “Agrarian.” Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, 1971. Text not located.
———. “Lightning Stick.” Southwest Review, vol. 58, no. 3, summer 1973, p. 225.
———. “Tonto Ruins.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 47, no. 1, spring 1973, p. 64.
———. “Cave Pictures: Carlsbad Caverns.” Southwest Review, vol. 59, no. 4, autumn 1974, p. 507.
———. “A Word from the Playwright.” Mississippi Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1974, pp. 13–14.