Post by shayepoet on Sept 6, 2008 22:55:34 GMT 2
Child in the Road
Cindy Savett
Child in the Road is a mother's response to the sudden death of her young daughter, a rendering of the wide range of emotions experienced afterwards--not description, but an expression of grief from its center. The poems pull vivid imagery from the deepest layers of the unconscious, postcards from a sleepwalker unable to find rest, waking again and again in the wrong story. Who is alive and who is dead? What does it mean to go on living, "eyes searching / under the earth"?
Sample poem:
Untitled
Your name is the ocean reefs
and cliffs of white froth
skies that dip the night to its knees
You are the windcry among tall firs
hands that part seas
in the arc of stars
God of sediment slipping to the sea
child whose feet are darkness
flesh of the coming storm and sand between the lips
You are a single beating wing
a rock split for birthmilk
from under the sifted dirt
Praise for Child in the Road:
"With a rare combination of intensity fused to grace, the poems in Cindy Savett's first collection, Child in the Road, feel as if they might have been written by a sailor who walked the plank and disappeared into the depths. The poems care nothing for the events or ordinary logic of life on land. They never come up for air--and don't seem to have to. It is as if Savett created each line with an extraordinary lung capacity, so that her poetry can live at the bottom of the ocean of the unconscious--enabling us to live there, too.... The poems shape a brilliant coral reef discovered in the waters of a turbulent dream."
--Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems
"I read Child in the Road as one long poem, lyric, meditative, wheeling, fierce; for all its richness of language, it seems to be reaching for some place beyond language, from which to mourn the death of a young child:
bless this plate of bones
bless this twisted flight
this first of hours
bless this carrying horse
knees bent
on Mother's Trail."
--Jean Valentine, author of The Cradle of the Real Life and the 2004 National Book Award winner, Door in the Mountain
*****
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About the author:
Cindy Savett teaches poetry workshops at psychiatric institutions in the Philadelphia area to both acute short-term and residential patients. She is published in numerous print and on-line journals, including Margie, Heliotrope, LIT, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and Free Verse. She is also at work on a memoir on the death of her daughter. Additionally, Cindy has served on several school Boards and other non-profit agencies. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she spent fifteen years in the retail business, traveling extensively overseas. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Merion, Pennsylvania with her husband and children.
Website: www.cindysavett.com
ISBN: 978-1-60235-029-8, 131 pages, $15.00
Parlor Press, Free Verse Editions
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