Deerbrook Editions is Pleased to Announce
Hyacinth for the Soul
Poems by Joan I. Siegel
87 pages; 6 x 9 trade paper; price $16.95; ISBN 978-09712488-9-2
Available this spring
IN PRAISE OF HYACINTH FOR THE SOUL
These passionate, caring poems range seamlessly from personal lyric to public outcry, from a pair of well-turned pantoums of childhood memories to a poem that rewrites the liturgy of a responsive reading from the Passover service. Siegel knows how to go for the small specific details that illuminate even the darkest subjects.
—Maxine Kumin
Reading this extraordinary collection, I’m reminded of John Crowe Ransom’s statement that death “is the great subject of poetry, the most serious subject.” Within its persistent shadow, Siegel writes of love, both domestic and romantic, of the burden of human suffering, and of the regenerative powers of nature and the human spirit. And she does so with the impeccable ear of a musician and the craftsmanship of a master jeweler. This is an important book.
—William Trowbridge
The tactile, the visible and even the invisible become like avatars in Joan Siegel's poems. She writes of the voyeur's sensuous experience of everything surrounding her. These poems give you all her senses, transforming even the painful ones into lush realization.
—Diane Wakoski
An expert weaver at her loom, Joan Siegel threads death in and out of Hyacinth for the Soul. Written with a lyrical but unsentimental voice, there is not a poem in this impressive collection that is not an uncompromising encounter with reality. Binding us to her world with sensual detail, Joan Siegel refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed as her poems “tap in the dark, call to each other.” Ultimately, providing a “map out of darkness,” Hyacinth for the Soul teaches us how to ignite a candle that the heart can follow.
—Vivian Shipley
Hyacinth for the Soul is a beautifully well-worked piece of imagination: ironic, lyrical, and elegant. Siegel’s poems so often begin in daily living, poems that value the very simple or modest: what “abides” or “suffices.” Sometimes somber, and sometimes happy, her poems shoot out into the cosmos and let us look at our living from that vantage. There are the pleasures of metaphor, where the parts of an idea suddenly condense or burst into a completely new structure that we recognize immediately: the "shape turning in the flame."
—Rosemary Deen
Poetry Editor, Commonweal
Joan Siegel's new collection, Hyacinth For The Soul, "pushes the door open on memory," determined to resurrect the "forgotten things," and to preserve all that will be lost, from her daughter's first words, to the "blue that smells of rain and colors the wild lupine." Siegel does not hesitate to "lift the heaviness left at her door" and transform it through the details of human experience and a love for the natural world into finely crafted lyrical poems of witness. Remembering becomes a legacy for her daughter and a generous gift to her readers.
—Frances Richey
Co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books/2002), Joan I. Siegel is recipient of the1999 New Letters Poetry Prize and the 1998 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY/Orange, she lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.
Publication date April 2009
Published by Deerbrook Editions - P.O. Box 542 - Cumberland, ME 04021
Phone & FAX 207-829-5038
Available now from the publisher, through local bookstores, or Amazon.com; listed with Books In Print ; Deerbrook Editions books are distributed by SPD / Small Press Distribution, www.spdbooks.org
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