Falling Out of the Sky

While the poems of Deborah Pope’s latest collection are rooted in the here and now―the place where tables are set, children play, and empty cans collect―they are also suffused with a spirit of transfiguration and the miraculous. They map an earthy, palpable, yet oddly luminous landscape that embraces our most intimate relationships with lovers, with relatives, and with the body itself. Ranging over this terrain that is at once familiar and fearsome, Pope engages difficult questions and complex emotions, hard truths and fierce connections.

Pope employs plain yet sensuous language, lyrical intensity, and startling images to deal with both the commonplace (“Age. How to think of it.”) and the extraordinary (“An angel has begun to speak to me”). These poems are not passive in their perceptions or their passions. There is the anger of children, the clutch of illness, the rawness of love and grief alike, the strangeness of revelation. At times they literally wrestle with angels.

In this mature, powerful collection, Pope boldly reveals her own grief, fears, and regrets as well as the grace, mercy, and love she shows and is shown. Falling Out of the Sky beautifully communicates the profound and enigmatic relationship between love and desire, hate and betrayal, despair and hope.