Sign-In
Cart
Cyanometer
Paperback
Publisher Price: $14.99
ISBN13: 9781646626533
Publisher: Finishing Line Pr
Published: Oct 15 2021
Pages: 42
Weight: 0.14
Height: 0.10 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Faith Paulsen vividly captures the intimacies, secrets, and sorrows between beloved family members and friends. In the midst of losses, wonder and compassion abound: a hummingbird is a trick of the eye that evokes the speaker's mother sipping tea as it savor[s] rosewater in a call to prayer. In a meditation on a wondrous invention designed to measure every shade of sky, a voice urges, Make my body an instrument to measure the blues. A mother who transforms her grown son's bedroom into an office lingers in memory and longing until Missing him / is the dervish bell she whirls in. / Missing him is its own language. Even as her poems lament Losses [that] swim away / like minnow / as we try to count them, Paulsen's contemplative poems resonate deeply with love and the vibrancy of life.
-Dilruba Ahmed, author of Bring Now the Angels
Opening with a pastoral awhirl in whooshing and lush specific detail, Cyanometer grounds readers firmly in the now and gives us poems of presence and attention. We move from now to past, from intimate family moments to times of historical import. A collection so seamlessly organized, I urge readers to read from beginning to end at least once-no skipping around. Poem follows poem on a music-drenched journey from the present to the past and back, from a poignant moment of imagining the future minus a dying mother, to a childhood memory of watching that same mother pin up her hair with its scent of Breck shampoo. The choice to turn a grown son's bedroom into an office becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to miss, or be missing, a study of absence that is its own kind of presence. In Ode to a Fossil, Paulsen brings us an outlook, / layer on layer/on layer, /a deposition of sediment//mudstone, siltstone, redwall. This is the vista of Cyanometer-a deposition of layers of memory, observation, and, ultimately, well-earned wisdom.
-Liz Abrams-Morley, Author of Beholder
The title, Cyanometer, forms the conceit for Faith Paulsen's book of poems that marvel at the many hues of looking inward and looking back. Urgent images and quick flashes of narrative are given in a language so vital and attentive that the strictures of grammar cannot hold back the rush of sense memory and sudden insight into the nature of self seen from all directions. What capacious observations of her own self are refracted through those of the rabbit, the elephant, the Marianas Trench, her friends, family and, in the final poems of love and loss, her mother. Like the dragonfly of Pompeii which, with one beat of its lucent wings / left its mark, so Paulsen leaves hers in poems of reflection, lament, and delight.
-J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair
Also from
Paulsen, Faith
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover