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The Captain Lands in Paradise
Sarah Manguso’s first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2002
About the author
Sarah Manguso
23 books768 followersSarah Manguso is the author of nine books, most recently the novel LIARS.
Her previous novel, VERY COLD PEOPLE, was longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 ARGUMENTS, ONGOINGNESS, THE GUARDIANS, and THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY.
Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages.
She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.
Her previous novel, VERY COLD PEOPLE, was longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 ARGUMENTS, ONGOINGNESS, THE GUARDIANS, and THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY.
Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages.
She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 3, 2007
Holy fuck.
This is one of those books of poetry I keep next to my elbow while writing prose, so I can read it and be inspired when my own prose starts not to sound beautiful enough.
It's also one of those books of poetry that makes you desperate to be best friends with the author, and SURE that she would be your best friend, if only you could meet her.
Seriously. It's like having fantastic sex next to a half-open window on the first cold day of autumn. That's how good.
This is one of those books of poetry I keep next to my elbow while writing prose, so I can read it and be inspired when my own prose starts not to sound beautiful enough.
It's also one of those books of poetry that makes you desperate to be best friends with the author, and SURE that she would be your best friend, if only you could meet her.
Seriously. It's like having fantastic sex next to a half-open window on the first cold day of autumn. That's how good.
October 1, 2009
Her first, the obviously-an-MFA-manuscript book. Which is not to say there aren't delightful and astonishing moments. But nothing that makes me have to put the book down because I am so blown away. Not yet anyway.
September 4, 2024
I have nothing to do with the universe.
I prefer to stay here with you.
-- "The Piano"
I hold an empty tub
to the sky above your head
to arrest any ill-behaved stars
while you are a non-swimmer
in a boatful of dangerous crewmates.
-- "Poem of Comfort in Which I Am Powerless"
One one hand, this is an appeal to the universe. On another, it is a love letter to a sailor, the first sailor in the world -- that is, the one who guides his craft beyond the empyreal doorjamb.
On the other side, a voice: Hello, sailor!
As I age, things become clearer -- clearer and clearer. Saying that is a sort of joke.
Withered are the leaves, naked is the sky above my head. Where has the time gone? Was I not just a child?
Childhood consists of misunderstanding things you have no right including in your childhood.
-- "The Precision We Need Is of Another Earth"
An entire afternoon looking up, maybe throwing a ball. The shape of the sky through the trees. The trees, and the shape of that sky, and the woods' shape below. It was not quite the country, and I knew this, lying on the picnic table in winter -- everything white and almost silent -- supine, trying to feel something. The spring we had the hurricane I was old enough to take note of certain facts. My mother was sitting in our yellow-lit cellar listening to a portable radio. The voices on the radio sounded wrong because of the way she had set the tuner. I knew afterward my father had been outside, had seen the stretched-out power lines. Our neighbor was also there. Since then I have made it a picture -- old lady standing in the wind, arms out, dogs behind her -- dogs pressed against a wall, she about to fly, three blind dogs hooting, she flying, the buoyant on the air, riding and not knowing why, not knowing that what they saw of the storm was all I saw.
-- "The Hurricane"
I prefer to stay here with you.
-- "The Piano"
The lifeguards wade out halfway to the breakers
in their blue uniforms -- how can they know
what it is to save me, drowning in a lake
moving like boiling soup because the earth
spins and shakes and refuses to die, refuses
to fly heavenward and meet its cold moon?
-- "American Reverie"
I hold an empty tub
to the sky above your head
to arrest any ill-behaved stars
while you are a non-swimmer
in a boatful of dangerous crewmates.
-- "Poem of Comfort in Which I Am Powerless"
Around you move many sees. It is impossible not to drown a little.
-- "Address to Winnie in Paris"
One one hand, this is an appeal to the universe. On another, it is a love letter to a sailor, the first sailor in the world -- that is, the one who guides his craft beyond the empyreal doorjamb.
On the other side, a voice: Hello, sailor!
As I age, things become clearer -- clearer and clearer. Saying that is a sort of joke.
Withered are the leaves, naked is the sky above my head. Where has the time gone? Was I not just a child?
Childhood consists of misunderstanding things you have no right including in your childhood.
-- "The Precision We Need Is of Another Earth"
This is a picture of love: two gondolas in the dark.
This is also a picture of love: a hill covered with snow
and in the distance just within view... a snowman.
Another love story:
I think there is a knife in my head somewhere.
-- "Short Essay on Love"
An entire afternoon looking up, maybe throwing a ball. The shape of the sky through the trees. The trees, and the shape of that sky, and the woods' shape below. It was not quite the country, and I knew this, lying on the picnic table in winter -- everything white and almost silent -- supine, trying to feel something. The spring we had the hurricane I was old enough to take note of certain facts. My mother was sitting in our yellow-lit cellar listening to a portable radio. The voices on the radio sounded wrong because of the way she had set the tuner. I knew afterward my father had been outside, had seen the stretched-out power lines. Our neighbor was also there. Since then I have made it a picture -- old lady standing in the wind, arms out, dogs behind her -- dogs pressed against a wall, she about to fly, three blind dogs hooting, she flying, the buoyant on the air, riding and not knowing why, not knowing that what they saw of the storm was all I saw.
-- "The Hurricane"
September 24, 2013
I don't think I'd win many arguments trying to convince you that Sarah Manguso's poems are personal. They aren't vignettes or quotidian or breathless. There isn't much in the way of a persona lurking behind her poems. Quite the opposite, there's an almost airless quality. Like looking up at the heavens in a night filled with stars and this text starts scrolling down like the opening sequence to star wars. That's what Manguso's poetry is like. Not non-sequiturs or quips or even aphorisms. Just these perfect little one sentence broadcasts. Perfect and complete. "The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened." "This is a picture of love: two gondolas in the dark." "It goes slowly, and when the great miracles come you fail to recognize them." I think she might be a seer. I think I need to go on a quest.
February 6, 2011
Great poems make you wish you were a poet. Or, if you once were a poet, great poems make you miss being a poet in a way not unlike, I suspect, one might miss God if one no longer believed in God. And these poems -- most of them, that is -- do that. Too many of them are too inscrutable, and so (while often beautiful) are a touch too alienating to give the book five stars. But the poems in here that stun ("Beautiful Things," "Wild Goose Chase," "Address to Winnie in Paris," "What I Found," "The Bartender in Hell," "Glencoe," "Two Variations on a Theme by Stevens," "Space," "Cha-Cha," "The Snow," "The Barn" and "The Hurricane"), stun.
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March 22, 2021good one. i did absolutely adore this sense of existential angst abt time/experience that i felt wound its way across this collection. might just be me, but i felt a consistent tension between allusions to scientific method and physics and measurement vs. stories abt failing to catch or remember or experience something. life being elusive because the hits start coming and they don't stop coming. it made me think abt the fact that human brains and human eyes cannot actually contiguously sense every nano-nano-second, like a zeno's paradox situation about how to Truly See Things and Truly Remember Them. i liked how the poems didn't explicitly focus on this philosophical idea, and more like it was a framework that wove its way through the poems regardless of topic by virtue of techniques like scientific allusion.
i was v compelled by the staidness of each of these poems; they explored a time/place/idea/vibe and rarely offered a sweeping forward motion or a closure to it. i thinks this leant itself to a sort of bitterness all coupled together; just that all these ambiguously sad or existential thoughts are left to hang there. but it's nice to see examples of poems that don't mount.
i was also tickled by using em-dashes to just cut off sentences before they finish (ie, "The moon rises in the planetarium and something seems about to -- if only you knew where to look.") it's a bit of a clumsy trick i guess; a very bald poetry-by-implicature, but seeing someone else do it made it more accessible as a technique to consider maybe :0
i was v compelled by the staidness of each of these poems; they explored a time/place/idea/vibe and rarely offered a sweeping forward motion or a closure to it. i thinks this leant itself to a sort of bitterness all coupled together; just that all these ambiguously sad or existential thoughts are left to hang there. but it's nice to see examples of poems that don't mount.
i was also tickled by using em-dashes to just cut off sentences before they finish (ie, "The moon rises in the planetarium and something seems about to -- if only you knew where to look.") it's a bit of a clumsy trick i guess; a very bald poetry-by-implicature, but seeing someone else do it made it more accessible as a technique to consider maybe :0
May 3, 2019
read this a year ago and found several of these poems striking enough to return to over and over again. heartbreak and the noumenon. a very funny collection.
"Wild Goose Chase," "Love Story With Bad Moral," "The Bartender in Hell,"
"Wild Goose Chase," "Love Story With Bad Moral," "The Bartender in Hell,"
March 11, 2019
I continue to love Sarah Manguso. Her poems are funny and surprising and a little convoluted. A very satisfying little book of poems.
April 12, 2020
The Captain Lands in Paradise is an eclectic collection of poems. Some of the work is outstanding. An impressive debut for Manguso.
September 8, 2022
3.5/5--it's really simply that I much prefer her prose and more recent work.
May 7, 2023
I read this book years ago, but “Address to Winnie in Paris” always stays with me.
July 18, 2008
Great poetry. Even if you don't like poetry, you should try it. "Beautiful Things" is now one of my all-time favorite poems. Check it out:
BEAUTIFUL THINGS
Sometimes I think I understand the way things work
And then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds.
On this world you can get out of work early, unclog the drain,
hear music. Any of the above should prove the existence
of God or at least some kind of beautifying engine
but in Germany when they couldn't figure out
how to tranquilize the polar bear and he was standing
in the park, the cage door broken, they shot him dead.
Nine hundred pounds——that's a lot of dead bear.
Neptune's pretty close to immortal,
as we understand the word, and I wouldn't like to be
that planet. But if I had to I would take it,
the decades of punishing rain, and the fires
on neighboring planets I would watch,
thankful I was never touched by them,
and that the diamonds were mine.
BEAUTIFUL THINGS
Sometimes I think I understand the way things work
And then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds.
On this world you can get out of work early, unclog the drain,
hear music. Any of the above should prove the existence
of God or at least some kind of beautifying engine
but in Germany when they couldn't figure out
how to tranquilize the polar bear and he was standing
in the park, the cage door broken, they shot him dead.
Nine hundred pounds——that's a lot of dead bear.
Neptune's pretty close to immortal,
as we understand the word, and I wouldn't like to be
that planet. But if I had to I would take it,
the decades of punishing rain, and the fires
on neighboring planets I would watch,
thankful I was never touched by them,
and that the diamonds were mine.
September 8, 2023
I love Manguso's prose (memoirs) so I was disappointed in this collection of poetry. Nothing pulled me in and there were poems that left me scratching my head, wondering what they were really about. I'll stick to her prose.
from Address to Winnie in Paris: "Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to / advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do / with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until after- / ward. // The part of the betrayal which woulds the most is hearing that it has / already happened."
from Two Variations on a Theme by Stevens: "First there is a thing and then there is / the account of the thing, bent into new / alphabets. Living your life twice is not feat."
from Address to Winnie in Paris: "Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to / advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do / with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until after- / ward. // The part of the betrayal which woulds the most is hearing that it has / already happened."
from Two Variations on a Theme by Stevens: "First there is a thing and then there is / the account of the thing, bent into new / alphabets. Living your life twice is not feat."
March 14, 2009
I'm interested in the way the imagination helps to spell out the wisdom in this book, and I'm assured of the imagination's strength in composing these poems, but I'm not sure how far they take me with their wisdom. And I feel that the speaker in these poems is very interested in making me understand what she has discovered.
June 17, 2019
Écrit il y a quelques années, ce recueil reste particulièrement intemporel, s'accroche au temps autant qu'il le laisse aller. On reconnait les balbutiements de la Manguso des années 2010, avec ses images fortes, relevant pratiquement du folklore ainsi que sa fascination pour la mort, toujours présente.
July 4, 2007
I'd eat it!
February 21, 2008
Like a primer when I began writing school and then like a "stone" because that's exactly what Jane M. said about using the word "stone" when you don't know shit.
March 17, 2009
Brilliant collection of poetry. I really like her work.
August 4, 2011
Brilliant book filled with fantastic language and imagery. I found the earlier poems in the book stronger than the later ones, but all are worth a read.
June 7, 2013
I just finished Two Kinds of Decay and feel drawn to read everything she has published in book form.
I admire her work, very much so.
I admire her work, very much so.
December 21, 2014
Some really great stuff here, but I much prefer her second collection, Siste Viator, which feels like it has more skin in the game, so to speak.
April 23, 2015
Manguso's sometimes esoteric style works well in her short prose; in poetry, it prompts more questions than it solves.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews