Stones Ripe for Sowing - Softcover

Bernardin, Libby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941209858 ISBN 13: 9781941209851

Publisher: Press 53, 2018

Synopsis

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining--her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sowing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to "forage in hard and doubtful places." --John Lane

About this title

Review

Libby Bernardin has crafted a haunting collection from a life well lived and carefully examined. These stunning poems question and affirm while eschewing answers. They invite us to “step into doubt, that hard stone, / seed of spring, of water, of fire.” Firmly grounded in the natural world, Bernardin trains her gaze deep into our very nature and existence, addressing loss and grief, aging, wonder and joy, all the contradictions of our human existence, with language that is at once lyrical and precise. These poems celebrate the every day and the sacred. This is a collection that invites you to become “a new person emerging from this hard case, / a chrysalis with one wing out, trembling.” —Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air

 

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining—her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sowing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to “forage in hard and doubtful places.” —John Lane, author of Anthropocene Blues

 

The title perfectly captures Bernardin’s unerring use of metaphor and metaphysical, self-deprecating wit, as does, “Nothing to it,/forgetting yesterday:/I blow it like kisses to past phantoms.” She would never claim to grow flowers from the stones of loss, grief, or vagaries of aging, but she does. Her luscious, painterly poems find solace in nature; joy and beauty even in grief; simultaneously youthful and wise, and brimming with life; compassionate and unfailingly generous, “scattering seeds/like grain cast/among the famished,” sharing “the god-like immensity of ordinary things.” —April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

Edition details

• Publisher: Press 53
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1941209858
• ISBN 13: 9781941209851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 82