Catharine Savage Brosman

Catharine Savage Brosman Poems

Catharine Savage Brosman Biography

Catharine Savage Brosman (born 1934, an American poet, essayist, and scholar of French literature) was a professor at Tulane University, where she held the Gore Chair of French Studies. Brosman was born in Denver; she spent her girlhood there and in Alpine, Texas. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rice University (then The Rice Institute) with a B.A. in Romance languages (1955) and an M.A. in French (1957). She then studied in France as a Fulbright scholar. She took her Ph.D. in French from Rice in 1960. She taught French at Rice, Sweet Briar College, the University of Florida, and Mary Baldwin College before settling at Tulane University in 1968, where she was appointed full professor in 1972. In 1990 Brosman was named Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities for one term; she occupied the Gore Chair of French Studies from 1992 until her retirement as professor emerita as of 1997. She served also as visiting professor at the University of Sheffield in 1996 and was named Honorary Research Professor there. Brosman has published numerous single-authored and edited books on French literature, including five volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Her poems have been published by journals in the United States and in England and France (in translation). In addition to the volumes listed below, she has published four chapbooks of verse, and her poems have been reprinted in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She has also published translations of French poets. After living in New Orleans for nearly forty years, she moved to Houston at the end of 2007. Many of the poems in Breakwater and On the Old Plaza were inspired by Brosman's remarriage in 2008 to her first husband, Patric Savage.)

The Best Poem Of Catharine Savage Brosman

Plums

They're Santa Rosas, crimson, touched by blue,
with slightly mottled skin and amber flesh,
transparently proposing by their hue
the splendor of an August morning, fresh

but ruddy, ripening toward fall.—"So sweet,
so cold,' the poet said; but this one's tart,
its sunny glow perfected in deceit,
as emulation of a cunning heart.

I eat it anyway, until the pit
alone remains, with scattered drops of juice,
such sour trophies proving nature's wit:
appearances and real in fragile truce.

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