Post by shayepoet on Oct 23, 2008 3:07:15 GMT 2
Sitting in the Sky
Annie Deppe
Annie Deppe was included in the Forward Anthology of best poems of 2003, and Sitting in the Sky was chosen by Professor Philip Hobsbaum of Glasgow University as one of the four best books published in 2003.
Sample poem:
Rue de Lille
The same man who sang
in my dream, sings in the street
beneath my hotel room.
My first night in Paris, 4 a.m.,
and this man's a whole chorus--
not content to be just
a tenor, he takes all
the parts, one after another.
As he turns off rue de Lille
he's a soprano
heading towards the river.
Then a phrase of Brahms,
descending into baritone,
drifts back to my window--
Siehe, ich sage euch
ein Geheimnis. I know
these words, sang this Requiem
not long after my mother's death.
Behold I show you a mystery:
we shall not all sleep
but we shall all be changed...
There are times when it feels
we're lifted on something,
summoned by shadow, touch, or
some other element
we don't yet know. Like the brilliant
shades of a moth's wing
which depend upon emptiness.
Light strikes dark inner walls
and sends back trumpets of colour.
Wings iridescent as singing
that wakes you on a spring night.
Six years my mother's been gone
but it feels like a chorus of one.
Not quite asleep
but not quite changed.
Review for Sitting in the Sky:
Annie Deppe's poems keep running to the fact of edges—to lighthouses, cliffs, last houses, deaths of parents, relations between a loving couple, even the edge of my understanding. She becomes a kind of pilgrim in her own life: eyes wide open, all her sense turned to the world and what's beyond it, beyond the lovingly recorded, richly remembered facts. The world can be a shadowland [where] everything blends, but these are poems of intense, discreet distinction celebrating the persistence of things, the tenacity of what lives, of what—in the often vexed zone of human relations—endures, what survives as love. While hers can be a world in which nothing seems fixed, she still insists on the abiding fact of joy: her poems testify again and again to this joy, to her belief that Somewhere it exists, Somewhere it wants to be found. Joining observation to memory and a generous lyrical imagination, she keeps finding it and, in this fine first collection, sharing it with us.
--Eamon Grennan
About the author:
Annie Deppe is the author of Sitting in the Sky (Summer Palace Press, Ireland, 2003).
Her work has been anthologized in the Forward Book of Poetry 2004. She has received a title-by-title individual grant from the Irish Arts Council and was selected by Poetry Ireland for their Introductions reading series. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland, Sou'wester, The Stinging Fly, The Shop, The Recorder and elsewhere. A new collection of poetry will be brought out by Summer Palace Press in 2009. She works for Stonecoast in Ireland and currently makes her home in Galway, Ireland.
Website: deppe.org/node/4
ISBN-10: 0954475208
ISBN-13: 978-0954475208
Paperback: 64 pages
Summer Palace Press (12 Mar 2003)
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Summer Palace Press
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