LITMIR.BIZ

Swan Bones is a book about small towns and the people who inhabit them. Its poems follow the author from the hills of the Mohawk Valley to the cornfields of East Central Indiana, where she's lived for nearly a decade. They deal in everyday ironies, and it is in these spaces that Bowman crafts a unique vision defined by her stark honesty, distinctive lyricism, and persistent hope. She proffers quartz crystals despite layoffs; moonflowers, which only open when night falls. The poems practice a hard faith, and invite us to do the same.

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This debut collection of sonnets explores the cryptic personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Reimagining pivotal moments in his life story from unlikely perspectives–including those of Joseph, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, a Pharisee, and even Satan–the poems invite deeper engagement with the Gospel narrative. Jesus emerges from this mosaic-like treatment as a conscientious friend, steely reformer, and inspired poet–as well as an ordinary, troubled man. With lyrical nuance and intensity, Apocrypha brings to life the shadowy past of an iconic figure. Its humane vision speaks equally to believers and atheists, to theologians and lay readers, to students of history and lovers of poetry.

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These poems wander through life and memory. They explore art, music, and history, but in an atmosphere of subtropical wonder. Beauty and truth are close relations and the author explores both as memories of an earlier Florida compose a world of recall and invitation.

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Jesus is God, and we as necessarily devotional Christian poets must not shy away from that fact. These poems try to celebrate that reality, who He is, without sacrificing literary quality. They are distinctly American (baseball, jazz, and free verse) in form, Beat in the line of Mary Fabilli, Thomas Merton, and Daniel «stick it to the man» Berrigan. And they try to accomplish this without sacrificing humor and romp. May these, and all Christian poems, both now and in the future, wave that flag of freedom–no matter what our personal struggles. Our lives, our poems are about Jesus finally, the One who is mercy itself. May He look kindly upon us, and give us His peace.

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Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of life's journey, sorting detritus from treasures, identifying and naming memory, finding categories that reflect life's winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various roles–son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, neighbor, teacher, citizen, believer, writer, and reader–as narrative stances, Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex, Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus, it embraces the tension that language is inadequate, alien, and, paradoxically, a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zoller's poems how we speak about life–as physical passage, as spiritual pilgrimage, as imagined patterns, as emotional canvas, as interwoven narrative strands, and as social construct–all these voices meet in one conversation. Between «Photographs» that begins the book and «Hard Copy» that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to «Second Knowings,» from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time, eternity, and love.

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Beyond All Bearing distills and illuminates moments in ordinary lives, in ordinary time, and renders them extraordinary. These poems turn the quotidian into the rhythm and the rhyme that is poetry, preserving them on the page. Some of these moments shimmer with the beauty of pansies and paperwhites out of season; some flicker with the grace of candles placed on a table at the end of a tragic day or the grace of a holy kiss; some hum with love for family, friends, and students; some hint at a longing for God; some speak without flinching of unspeakable tragedy. And yet, among the songs of loss and grief that pervade this collection, God enters «beautiful beyond all bearing.»

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These poems explore the experience of a long marriage, and a decade of living at a distance. They ask how this love began, and how it might end.

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For the retired and/or retiring, a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual, a poet's musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club.
Life could become a summer afternoon, a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout, part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next.
The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure–napping, complaining, gardening, volunteering, and so on. Observing time's curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging, and understanding more clearly every day that time doesn't exist anyway, the poet relishes moments, which are
… liable to be caught like a leaf in the eddy of a brook, lodged only long enough to look,
and which become her subjects.

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In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.

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