Title: The City of Women
First published: 1993
Description: The City of Women marks a brilliant and ambitious advance in the career of the poet Publishers Weekly called "a proper son of modernism." Of his previous work, the Kenyon Review has observed: "Santos's execution is so successful, his poems so apparently effortless, that we are reminded in more than one way of Keats, of poetry that seems to come 'as naturally as the Leaves to a tree.' "And the New York Times Book Review pointed out: "Mr. Santos possesses a narrative gift and an eye for recollected detail...an intensity akin to Rilke's beautiful poems about childhood.".

In describing this, his third book, Sherod Santos writes: "The long poem-sequence The City of Women began in 1981 with a single entry in a notebook - 'That was how she preferred to remember us' - an entry that only revealed in time its darker underlying secrets: the unquestioned faith in a shared experience, the revisionist implications of the word 'preferred,' the unacknowledged end of a marriage." Over the next ten years, in a style that ranges through narrative, commentary, vignette, and verse, that riddling fragment would resolve itself into a sustained meditation on the nature and origins of erotic love.

In this charged, wholly original treatise Santos explores the tumult of that inner life as he masterfully uncovers the world and underworld of those ever-shifting relations between a man and a woman. The result is a work so seductive that we can't help but feel we've awakened somehow in that strangely mysterious city of the poem, where "lives are played out in a state of almost perpetual hallucination, [where] what goes on inside of us isn't so much a range of emotions as a...warring swirl of feelings we are hopeless to overrule."
Subjects: Poetry (poetic works by one author)
LC classification: PS3569.A57 C57 1993