Post by shayepoet on Sept 5, 2008 19:15:24 GMT 2
Letter from the Lawn
Bobbi Lurie
"Bobbi Lurie's Letter from the Lawn is a book of prayers, as well as a book of the child grown large and adult, sometimes lost, but who is crushed awake by beauty in a world of emotional volatility amidst the mist of leaves. I love the way it veers through the quotidian and makes a dream of it all, how things are not what they appear, how the erotic impulse drifts in like weather to claim the speaker(s) of these poems, to hold them tightly in the cool branches of the Godly world that stands brightly outside the kitchen windows of a consciousness who has loved and known pain, and who has found a kind of ecstasy in language that celebrates it all. Neither totally narrative, nor post avant, the poems in Letter from the Lawn are their own idiosyncratic things. They don't need classification. They are visceral and seamless and possess a breezy lyricism that is at once startling and consoling."
—David Dodd Lee
Sample poem:
What We Remember May Not Remember Us
1.
The clouds and the shadows of the clouds.
The early light, like the night undressing herself
revealing pink beneath, underneath
the glory and the intimacy
like early love made of arms
only arms
fingers
and the lingering promise
of something else.
2.
To breathe into what is...
Feelings dead and dry as winter branches
body poached and flattened
the sky with its glaucoma stare
the way you call yourself “I” and mean it
and want to be seen as such
as noun
as verb
as some idea which others cannot see.
3.
The plain loneliness of painters.
Their lust for colors
and the underneath of it.
It was Modigliani who saved me
from the dark unknowableness.
It was Soutine.
It was Cezanne.
It was the yellow and the green of it.
4.
And I cannot tell them.
I cannot tell the painters or the colors what they have done.
And I can not say what the clouds are.
Each shape passes me with its blues and its endless hues of white
and light and the longing which bleeds
into
the inner world.
Praise and reviews for Letter from the Lawn:
"There is a quiet intimacy to the poems in Bobbi Lurie’s collection Letters from the Lawn, an intimacy that lulls the reader into each depicted situation. Whether Lurie’s writing about a failed relationship or the loss of a parent, each poem is a focused and unflinching glimpse into another person’s life...."
". . .Lurie weaves ideas like perception and decay into vastly different poems....It is from these cloths of life that Lurie weaves a quilt of experience. Ultimately, the collection’s ability to move between worlds and perceptions are what set it apart. Though emotions may be familiar, the way in which they are framed are what make these “letters” worth reading."
—Lisa Bower, Jacket Magazine (Read entire review at: tinyurl.com/6x4ef7)
“Like doors open ‘just a crack,’ the poems in Bobbi Lurie’s Letter from the Lawn reveal intimate slivers of lives—a man smelling a rose he long ago planted, a woman stirring a man’s coffee, a pregnant woman alone in an apartment. And while these glimpses, like Edward Hopper paintings, often highlight our loneliness and the misery that is an inescapable ingredient in ‘the deep brew’ of the human condition, they all also, with great clarity, illuminate ‘the longing which bleeds/into/the inner world.’ Painterly, nuanced, and direct, these are poems that address the heart.”
—Carol Moldaw
“Bobbi Lurie has a steady, unflinching gaze. In these startling and moving new poems, where 'the dark / skies of evergreen fog of needles and breath' press in on us, Bobbi Lurie has created a series of dark splendors where, ultimately, no one is denied entrance to the wide circumference of the world.”
—Arthur Sze
About the author:
Bobbi Lurie's third book, Grief Suite, is forthcoming from CustomWords. Her other poetry collections are The Book I Never Read and Letter from the Lawn. Her poems have published in numerous print and on-line journals including APR, New American Writing, Otoliths, Shampoo and diode. She has worked as a therapist in many settings in order to make a living and always as a visual artist, working as a muralist whose first love was always printmaking. She wrote art reviews, drama reviews, book reviews and personal essays professionally for a number of years. Poetry is the great gift she received after being forced to give up the toxic chemicals of printmaking. She started writing art reviews but had lost her art form and knows what it means to be left without a means of artistic expression. Poetry appeared as a miracle in her life, giving her a second chance at being able to live life twice: first within the experience and twice in the expression of it. Never formally educated in poetry, her education comes from incessant reading and endless experimentation with her writing. She lives in New Mexico with her family.
ISBN: 1933456264, 91 pages, $17.00
CustomWords, 2006
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