A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
Joyce Carol Oates is best known, of course, as a novelist and short story writer. But she is also an essayist and critic, a playwright, and a poet of great distinction. The Time Traveler is a generous collection of Oates’s poetry from recent years.
Joyce Carol Oates is best known, of course, as a novelist and short story writer. But she is also an essayist and critic, a playwright, and a poet of great distinction.
The Time Traveler is a generous collection of Oates’s poetry from recent years. There are seventy poems, most of them previously published in literary magazines and journals, some obscure, some widely known, among them Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Grand Street, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, to name only a few. Brought together in a book, they represent and reemphasize the range of Joyce Carol Oates as a poet, the mastery of craft, the depth and intensity of feeling, the intuitive understanding and heightened perception of life that have made her so extraordinary a writer. Indeed, it is not unfair to say that poetry in its many guises and voices plays a significant (if sometimes subterranean) role in whatever she writes. As an artist at the height of her powers, Joyce Carol Oates is truly sui generis.
ContentsI. I SAW A WOMAN WALKING . . .
Loves of the Parrots
Your Blood in a Little Puddle, On the Ground
Self-Portrait as a Still Life
I Saw a Woman Walking into a Plate Glass Window
Whispering Glades
Playlet for Voices
An Ordinary Morning in Las Vegas
Welcome to Dallas!
Love Letter, with Static Interference from Einstein’s Brain
Luxury of Being Despised
Peaches, Pineapples, Hazelnuts . . .
White Piano
Don’t Bare Your Soul!
II. “I DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU”
Marsyas Flayed by Apollo
Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, 1902
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942
The Mountain Lion
Sparrow Hawk Above a New Jersey Cornfield
New Jersey White-Tailed Deer
Night
Dream After Bergen-Belsen
“I Don’t Want to Alarm You”
Makeup Artist
Photography Session
The Consolation of Animals
A Winter Suite
Winter Cemetery
Winter Love
Winter Solstice
Winter Threnody
Follies of Winter
Winter Wrath
Winter Boredom
Winter Aphorisms, Uncoded
Black Winter Day
Winter Noontide
The Thaw
Small Hymns
The Sacred Fount
III. YOUNG LOVE, AMERICA
Young Love, America
Night Driving
Waiting on Elvis, 1956
Roller Rink, 1954
American Merchandise
The House of Mystery
Poem in Death Valley
Flame
Undefeated Heavyweight, 20 Years Old
How Delicately . . .
Heat
Mania: Early Phase
Compost
Late December: New Jersey
Fish
In Jana’s Garden
IV. THE TIME TRAVELER
The Time Traveler
Sleepless in Heidelberg
Strait of Magellan
Miniatures: East Europe
An Old Prayer
Mud Elegy
Honeymoon: Forty Years
The Floating Birches
“I Can Stand There in the Corner . . .”
In Memoriam
Falling Asleep at the Wheel, Route 98 North
Last Exit Before Bridge
Locking Through
Weedy Logic
The Abandoned
The Miraculous Birth
ExcerptI Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window
I saw a woman walking into a plate glass window
as if walking into the sky.
I saw her death striding forward to meet her,
shadowed in flawless glass.
Dogwood blossoms drew her, a lilac-drugged air,
it was beauty’s old facade,
blinding,
blind: the transparency
that, touched, turns opaque.
The frieze into which she stepped buckled in anger
and dissolved in puzzle parts about her head.
* * *
I saw a woman walking into sunshine confident and composed
and tranquil to the last.
I saw a woman walking into something that had seemed nothing.
As we commonly tell ourselves.
The trick to beauty is its being unassimilable,
a galaxy of glittering reflections,
each puzzle part in place.
Not this raining of glass and blood
about the amazed head.
The unfathomable depths into which she stepped became
the merest surface,
Pain and noise.
* * *
I saw a woman walking into her broken body
as if she were a bride.
I saw her soul struck to the ground because mere space
could not bear it aloft.
I saw how the window at last framed only what was there,
beyond the frame,
that could not fall.
My throat filled with blood:
you would not have believed how swiftly.
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I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Celestial Timepiece 
WhClimb the mountains and get ther good
tiding nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows in to trees the wing will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy , while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
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