Update on the Descent

Ellen Hinsey's third collection, "Update on the Descent" is a powerful meditation on violence, war and human division. Drawing on personal and family experiences - including the murder of her grandmother - as well as research at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, "Update on the Descent" is the companion volume to "The White Fire of Time", a sequence of poetic works that explore the nature of terror as well as the sacred. Dynamically and innovatively written in lyrical and anti-lyrical forms, including prose and aphorism, "Update on the Descent" is a masterwork, an exploration of the extremes of the human condition, tackling issues of civil strife and tyranny, reconciliation and the renewal of the spirit.

With this book, Ellen Hinsey confirms her status as one of the most profound and intense poets of her generation. Update on the Descent is arranged in an extremely sophisticated pattern, alternating Dantean visions, contemporary accounts of torture, and thoughts on our human condition which crystallise into formulae possessing all the depth and darkness of Heraclitus. It has the touch of strangeness indispensable for any great poetry, but its moral message is straightforward and full of inner force., Ellen Hinsey has manifested a range of concern and a sensitivity to larger human issues which is the sine qua non of authentic poetry. She has found a way to be both truthful and original, to make poems which are absorbing and enlightening, historically pertinent and philosophically urgent…to our great good fortune they succeed in their unlikely ambitions., A true poet, whose sense of line, cadence and tonality is unsurpassed among poets of her generation.

Ellen Hinsey has published four books of poems: The Illegal Age (Arc Publications, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Choice; Update on the Descent (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist; The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2002; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003); and Cities of Memory (1996), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She also edited and co-translated Tomas Venclova’s The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). in 2017 Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova was published by Rochester University Press/Boydell & Brewer and Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism by Telos Press. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared widely in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Review, Poetry and The Irish Times. Her translations of contemporary French fiction and memoir are published with Riverhead/Penguin Books. Her other awards include a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Lannan Foundation Award. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College’s program and the French graduate school, the École Polytechnique.