Post by moira on May 16, 2008 21:25:52 GMT 2
Talking Underwater
Sally Bliumis-Dunn[/b]
Talking Underwater contains poems that address, with an honest voice, a failing marriage. The book follows my path through this pain, child rearing and, eventually, finding new love. I hope my poems will give other women courage to have faith in themselves. Feathered in are many poems of praise for the natural world.
Sample poem:
Heart
She has painted her lips
hibiscus pink.
The upper lip dips
perfectly in the center
like a Valentine heart.
It makes sense to me --
that the lips,
the open
ah of the mouth
is shaped more like a heart
than the actual human heart.
I remember the first time I saw it --
veined, and shiny
as the ooze of a snail --
if this were what
we had been taught to draw
how differently we might have
learned to love.
Reviews for Talking Underwater:
The best poems in Talking Underwater proceed tentatively, one line at a time, a pace that reassures us there is no agenda here, only the faith that one utterance will lead to another. Sally Bliumis-Dunn's readers are lucky to be part of this adventure, this pushing forth in the direction of revelation.
--- Billy Collins
Sally Bliumis-Dunn's poems concentrate their language by concentrating their consciousness; and the drama of human consciousness stunned by its self-discovery in the physical world yet ever alert to the beauties and terrors of that world is everywhere present in this astonishing, abrupt, tender, precise, and crystalline collection. To call Talking Underwater a magnificent first book is to do gravely insufficient justice to the scope and rigor of Bliumis-Dunn's voice, which is not just mature but triumphant.
--- Vijay Seshadri
What I admire in this elegant debut collection is how Sally Bliumis-Dunn mixes lyrical image with plain statement, creating an idiom that finds figures in meticulously observed flora and fauna for her body awareness and her own exactly felt emotional life. So hydrangeas in autumn become a "tree of sleeping eyes," the tip of a butterfly's wing is "pale as rain," and conquina shells are "my tiny survivors." In poems lit with a constrained erotic charge she imagines "another world, / where bodies are ripplings / of shadow and light," but in which her true base is the world of touch, "where being in the present / is the same as desire for / nothing more," and where what she sees in sea-horse, seagull and starfish is "not the movement of these creatures, / but their means of holding on."
--- Eamon Grennan
About the author:
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry and Creative Writing at Manhattanville College. She received her B.A. in Russian language and literature from U.C. Berkeley in 1983 and her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. Her poems have appeared in BigCityLit, Lumina, Nimrod, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry London, RATTLE, Rattapallax, Sthingy River Poetry Review and Chance of A Ghost, an anthology put out by Helicon Nine in 2005. In 2002 she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her manuscript, Talking Underwater, which has been a finalist for The University of Arkansas Press' First Book Prize in 2006, a semifinalist for The Kenyon First Book contest in 2002, the Bright Hill Press in 2005 and a finalist for the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize from Ashland Press in 2006, was published by Wind Publications in 2007. She lives in Armonk, New York with her husband, John. They share four children, Ben, Angie, Kaitlin and Fiona.
Website
ISBN 978-1-893239-69-2, 103 pages, $15.00
Wind Publications
[glow=teal,2,300]BUY HERE, BUY NOW:[/glow]
windpub.com/order.htm[/font]