Deception Pass by Standing, Signed (1 results)

Standing, Sue. Deception pass. Cambridge, Mass.: Alice James Books, 1984, 71pp., worn but good dust-jacket, old moisture wrinkling on rear panel, original price $12.95, very good gray cloth, no damage. nicely INSCRIBED to friends over several lines and with a poetic quotation and SIGNED by Sue Standing, May 1984. Cover design and painting by Mark Wethli. A moving book, notable above all for its purity and strength of feeling. To the grave and difficult task she has undertaken - of incorporating the pain left by violence and bereavement into a larger pattern of meaning - Sue Standing brings a wonderfully evocative range of images, with an immediacy that suggests folk art. I am especially drawn to her celebration of women's work - from the anonymous mourning picture to the Mason jars "which hold the light of fruit,/the taste of summer, and my mother's labor." Together with phrasing that is often succinctly memorable, this union of the rich and the homely gives Deception Pass the stamp of an authentic and original talent. (Amy Clampitt) - The nature poetry of the 80's, saddened but at home with Science, seeing what Science sees, is here in exemplary vigor, freshness and exactitude. In "The Very Rich Hours," I have a text one wary old humanist infidel can worship by, and it lifts my heart. - There are love poems here, worth learning deportment from, as Christina Rossetti's and e.e. cummings' and Auden's were once. And there's an extraordinary poem cycle, a series of elegies, at different distances from the death of the poet's mother, that opens doors of reality and doors of light in ways that are stunning, right, effortless and profound. It could anchor an anthology. (George Starbuck). 9780914086505 ISBN 0914086502.