Post by shayepoet on Jul 5, 2008 7:22:05 GMT 2
Firmament
Lois Marie Harrod
"In a good poet's career, there might be one book that heralds a felicity not
as evident in the previous collections, a book that embodies a turn from the
adroit to the virtuosic. Firmament is such a book."
-- BJ Ward
Sample poem:
Walt Whitman´s Sermon on Spirituality
to a Certain Congregation of Worms
Open your mouth to the cease that surrounds,
what has been grief becomes ground.
Consider Adam, how dust befell deliverance,
consider Eve, how labor confines.
Oh ye of little space, through you the dead and lying
enter the living, you the belly, you the beast
to another existence, without you nothing creeps
the face of the earth, without you nothing cheats
that which is the only is.
Praise for Firmament:
"In a good poet´s career, there might be one book that heralds a felicity not
as evident in the previous collections, a book that embodies a turn from the
adroit to the virtuosic. Firmament is such a book. A long-time fan of
Harrod´s work, never before had I felt so giddy with her music, so often
moved to admiring silence by her discoveries, so in the presence of such a
fine craftsperson. Most of these poems begin confined to a place, but all of
them lead the reader to a sense of the capacious within and without."
-- BJ Ward
"The title of one of Lois Marie Harrod´s poems, "Voltages for Different
Locations" captures the geography that is covered in Firmament. At one
point she observes, "Don´t get me wrong/ I do not think this world can save
us/ only that these photons have followed/a long narrow passage/to find me
here/at this moment." Like Elizabeth Bishop before her, Harrod creates a
landscape lit up by the high voltage of a poetry that wisely reminds us to
attend to "that which is the only is."
-- Christopher Bursk
tinyurl.com/5qdbte
About the author:
Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook Furniture is forthcoming from Grayson Press. Her Firmament was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007 and her Put Your Sorry Side Out, by Concrete Wolf in 2005. She won a 2003 poetry fellowship, her third, from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Her sixth book of poetry Spelling the World Backward (2000) was published by Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina Aiken, which also published her chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999) and her book Part of the Deeper Sea (l997). Over 300 of her poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Zone3. Her earlier publications include the books Every Twinge a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, l987), Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press, l991) and a chapbook Green Snake Riding (New Spirit Press, l994).
Blog: www.loismarieharrod.com/
ISBN-13: 978-1599242231, $14.00
Finishing Line Press; 1st edition (2007)
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Amazon: tinyurl.com/6j6htl
Finishing Line Press: tinyurl.com/4fo72x