Biblioasis

Robyn Sarah: Pause For Breath
[978-1-897231]

$17.95

Click to enlarge

Look beyond the everyday meaning of the title phrase, and hear a summing-up of life itself: one day we come into the world, one day we leave it again – and what is the time between, what is our whole span on earth, if not a pause for “breath”?

Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts – from the public and collective to the personal and private, from the lyrical to the rhetorical – the poems in this collection are a meditation on time, aging, and mortality, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.

So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience. – Eric Ormsby

"[Her poems] illuminate the reader's privacy without destroying the poet's. And elegant play is going on even in the most acutely painful moments of clarity, a play of pure energy." – Margaret Avison

Her exquisite poems are worth making much about for their lyrical precision, indeed their wisdom. Sarah can write well in any form, including prose and free verse, but her most appealing poems are those in which quiet wordplay flirts with formal rigor? [Her poems] give me that much-sought-after feeling that I'm in the hands of a real poet rather than one of the slap-dash whiners who make most of the noise these days. My pleasure grows as I turn the pages of this collection, finding various kinds of grace in nearly every poem. She offers domestic moments reminiscent of Rachel Hadas and Emily Grosholz, but also, like them, a larger intellectual vision. Plenty of poets have written about history, faith, and family life, but few contemporaries have done it with such grace. – David Mason, The Hudson Review

This product was added to our catalog on Monday 28 September, 2009.

Customers who bought this product also purchased

Terry Griggs: Thought You Were Dead

Ray Robertson: Moody Food