Books

Sylvia Webber is a poet of many voices. The poems collected here display the work of a sharp mind and feeling heart making sense of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With emotional depth and psychological acuity, these lyrics express a stunning range of registers that shift from poignance to outrage to devastating wit. Each one reveals an eye and ear acutely attentive to image and sound. A gift for acute observation takes flight in lyrics voiced from the perspective of a young woman passionately alive to the world she inhabits, as in The House of Life, where The chimney coughs waspish/wisps of twilight smoke that,/choked from the soot-scarred/throat, blooms lilies in the sky; or an older woman immersed in the sensory play of color that weaves through Quad Diptych, where A tiny boat glides over the glassy surface of the water,/deceptively calm, for it is a river winding to the sea/in a strong current, luminous in the moonlit night/in dark shades of blue-green; aquamarine, turquoise,/peacock blue; it glows with a phosphorescent light.

Harriet Linkin, Emerita Distinguished Professor of English, New Mexico State University.