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"I was born unacquainted,
the beasts say," writes the poet, who in poem after poem proceeds to acquaint
us with our most primitive fears and dreams in a world still primordial.
But these poems also accomplish the miracle of transmuting ordinary life
into something rare by revealing its secret dimensions. |
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The poems in The Bible of
the Beasts of the Little Fiel, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's fifth collection,
are rooted in landscape and weather. Their images are so closely bound to
the natural cycles of seasons and generations that it is surprising to realize
how many deal with isolation and the indifference of the natural world to
our own lives.
"Why is love so difficult?" asks the poet, yet she is deeply saddened when
she must "take time out to mourn" the slightest of earth's creatures. The
poems create a unique mythology, familiar and yet profoundly the author's
own. Everything she touches turns to legend. When the poet writes, "It took
cunning to drape the spaces, hold the voices back," we realize that much
more than cunning was needed to write these poems. |
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DARKNESS
Prince of Darkness,
You lift your cloak,
And all is black, no birds
Sing there.
Everywhere,
There are black flowers
And strange, thin shapes
Who pick them and drift off,
Dark arms full of blossoms.
They rustle like paper
And that is the single sound.
There is no weather,
Just a chill, a dampness.
No paths to follow
Toward your lake
Whose other side is light,
Whose depth
Drowns all swimmers,
And the women
Drift incessantly,
Burdened black
With narcissi,
Each less visible
Than a shadow
Among the many moving shades. |
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"Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is that rarity, a fine novelist and
poet...Each poem exemplifies intelligence, heightened and transmitted through
vivid imagination, brilliant imagery, and remarkable formal integrity. How
she can sustain such power, poem after poem, makes one marvel at her
craft."
POETRY Magazine
"In our common fate Schaeffer has found the thread that runs through disparate
lives, beliefs, and generations."
Chicago Review |
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