The Strict Economy of Fire

Download or read book The Strict Economy of Fire written by Ava Leavell Haymon and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Nepal, a group of American women trek into the Himalayas, beginning and ending in Kathmandu. They ascend, turn back just short of reaching their destination because of impassable snow, and descend. “Say what you see,” smoke rising on a distant mountain seems to command, and Ava Leavell Haymon responds with language that strives to reconcile the extremes of this exotic place— danger and awesome beauty, community and abandonment, death and life, flame’s heat and altitude’s cold, an alien landscape and the poet’s own deep memories. Fires—of cooking, festivals, cremation, deforestation, and starvation—rage through the poems; like the name of the Hindu goddess Kali, fire is “destruction and creation / in one word.” An exacting yet exhilarating poetry collection, The Strict Economy of Fire asks what we can know and what we can never know “on this far side of the earth.”