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NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK
AWARD |
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Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's
second volume of poetry speaks of what it is to be a lover, a parent, a child
in this world--adrift on a planet where everything is strangely, wondrously,
frighteningly alive and fraught with omens. |
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Things, both animate and
inanimate--plants and animals, houses and rocks--spring their surprises on
an innocent and bewildered mankind: they alarm, they confound, they entice,
they repel. The poems are a searching for meaning in a world where there
may be none, or where the meaning may be worse than we care to imagine.
Yet it is a world of unexpected graces. Mrs. Schaeffer's poetry is lyric
and ironic, tinged by surrealism but highly readable and immensely
moving. |
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POST MORTEM
The sky is reduced,
A narrow blue ribbon banding the lake.
Someone is wrapping things up.
The curving horizon flattens to corners.
Someone is peeling back
The green parchment of the hills.
Hinged, the cherubed ceiling tilts to blackness.
The stars blink and fade.
Two fingers lift the house,
A tiny package.
Eyes shut,
I lie quiet beneath mounded quilts.
Have they marked things fragile?--
My glass bones break.
This time I hope for
Museums, pedestals,
Columns casting shadows
Themselves too heavy to move,
Even the dust heavy
In sculptured, marble light.
The movers of this life
Were not careful enough. |
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"These poems are completely original, associative and
fascinating."
Anne Sexton
"Susan Schaeffer's GRANITE LADY brings to mind, as has no other book of poems
for a long time, Emily Dickinson's test for poetry: If I feel physically
as if the top of my head were taken off, I know THAT is poetry." If Susan
Schaeffer's poetry calls to mind Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath (for whom
she writes an elegy), it is not because of identity of style but because
of a community of power. Ms. Schaeffer has found her own voice—and it
is electrifying."
James A. Miller, Jr.
"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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