Post by shayepoet on Jul 12, 2008 22:20:24 GMT 2
Ashes in Midair
Susan Settlemyre Williams
"Susan Settlemyre Williams’s Ashes in Midair is a marvelous book that, at times, seems almost epic. This poet maps the elemental and the essential side-by-side, and we are drawn into the necessary fabric of these sonorous revelations. Here, opposites seem to serve each other; they make each other almost sacred. Though the poems in Ashes in Midair often excavate the otherworldly, this poignant collection also keeps us faithful to the business of this world. From first poem to last, from basic hunger to the heightened fire located in earthy desire, the moments of surrealism and shaped dualism throughout this wonderful body of work abide in leaps of faith. The accrued, urgent, penetrating beauty in these poems is a gift."
— Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Sample poem:
Albuquerque, Your Ashes in Midair
for Rebecca Gault
Your brown empty city. The desert’s out
of flower. Nothing holds it, grain
on grain. Light as sky in my palm,
in a blue ice cream carton, I hold the gray
soft feathers of your ash. Which will be set
in the brass pan against the other brass pan
that holds the feather of truth. Weighing,
nothing on nothing—I’m wrong, it’s the heart
that’s weighed. Your dust doesn't balance
anything; it hangs a long time in the heat,
lifts on an updraft. In storm season once
I flew through desert thunderheads rising
in giant chimneys, miles above
the plane. I don’t understand weightlessness
or perfect balance, the boy hired to take out
my half-uprooted, leaning pine, how
he roped himself to it, walked upright its tilting
height. Left-handed, he chain-sawed
a branch on the left, then right-handed, one
on the other side, stood on their stumps and slashed
limbs, one hand and one hand, and balanced
on those stumps, and the dust
didn't fall at all, it seemed, sand-colored,
only hover and lift, until I couldn't watch him
step onto sky, how he swung himself
out on his rope and glided to earth, in three
strokes brought down the armless trunk.
The sky had no clouds, and the limbs
were slow and brown, but the ground shuddered
each time one came down on the tattered
chrysanthemums. The boy hung in the air
like his weight was nothing up there.
I don’t understand how the body can be burnt
into nothing, this little plume I let go.
When I dreamed of Suzanne come back,
she had no more weight than you, but she glowed
and her milk-blind eyes had turned
to aquamarines. I want you radiant like her,
not dust hovering in brown summer air.
Raves for Ashes in Midair:
"Ashes in Midair is a four part confessional without the box, lucid monsoon of emotional harmonies, x-ray scenarios, sinister cages, racing headless between life and death, voice and shadow. Her poems read like wicked tarot prophesy, a space where entering names in a book might save one from discovering that the face of God is never a human face. Williams is truly a Queen of Wands!”
— Tim Z. Hernandez, Skin Tax, Winner of the American Book Award
“Her poems the stuff of ‘earth and nightmares,’ Susan Settlemyre Williams’s greatest gift is in controlling myriad disorientations, her renderings of even fear and madness becoming darkly beautiful translations of human experience. Ashes in Midair is a splendid, wholly mesmerizing volume.”
— Claudia Emerson, Late Wife, Pulitzer Prize 2006
"Few debut collections can claim the confidence of Susan Settlemyre Williams’s. With immense technical swagger and a nerviness that never overpowers her considerable empathy and elegiac tenderness, Williams investigates both the domestic and the strange. She is above all a spiritual writer, and—like the best such writers—understands that gnosis arrives as much through desecration as through piety. Ashes in Midair is a stirring, engrossing, and haunted book."
— David Wojahn, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004
"How many poets are able to sift the human spirit from the ashes? In Susan Williams’ beautiful first book, even the ghostly presences felt in a world’s world of dangers are made our intimates. What is personal is offered up with such close attention that, poem after poem, we find ourselves nodding “yes.” Her fables deliver the concomitant mysteries of appearance and disappearance; they unveil the shadow of the predator while revealing the fierceness with which we long to come to terms with its purposes. These poems remind us that every work of art, even art that acknowledges despair is, ultimately, an act of hope.
— Jeffrey Levine, Tupelo Press
"The mythic and the modern speak to each other in these poems, and sometimes shout, wrestling and clinching and breaking away. Our times and all times think they have places for women—holes to bury them, pedestals to raise them again invisible, newly enveloped in patinas fashioned to be inescapable—while the work here is to break free, to answer back every time in language that strikes hammer blows from within and without. In Susan Settlemyre Williams’s writing, an earthquake drums the underworld, the empty eye is filled, and another resurrection begins, Ashes in Midair."
— Gregory Donovan, Calling His Children Home, Senior Ed., Blackbird
On-Line Reviews:
"These poems are hard-won and emotionally arresting. They emerge from that necessity to endure, taking possession of those things which possess us, which devastate us or lift us up to a place we can only know through human expression, however limited it might seen. And that knowledge, that ultimate consummation, is an absolute necessity in Susan Settlemyre Williams’ poetry."
-- Larry Bradley, The Yalobusha Review, University of Mississippi, (tinyurl.com/6pl6x8)
"Williams worries constantly at that stitched-up place in the psyche where the secret can become the sacred."
-- Ron Smith, Styleweekly.com (tinyurl.com/5s2nfp)
About the author:
Susan Settlemyre Williams is the author of Ashes in Midair, winner of the 2007 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2008), and a chapbook, Possession (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mississippi Review, 42opus, Shenandoah, Sycamore Review, and diode, among other journals, as well as in Letters to the World. Her poem “Lighter” won the 2006 Diner Poetry Contest and was selected for Best New Poets 2006. She is book review editor and associate literary editor of Blackbird (www.blackbird.vcu.edu) and lives in Richmond, Virginia.
ISBN: 978-1-886976-22-1, 90 pages, $15.95
Many Mountains Moving Press, 2008
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