Were Somewhere Else Now (ebook)

Description

In her first collection of new poetry in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.InWere Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarahs new poems move with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, but the tone is considerate and meditative, resulting in poems of quiet awe at the human experience. Sarahs newest collection shifts with ease between various perspectives: from the first to the third person to a collective we. Each poem is a lit room for the reader to look into: lit room to lit room.Were Somewhere Else Nowis essentially a collection that chronicles the COVID lockdown, tracking empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons for continuing to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the birds.Praise for Robyn SarahAs in her poetry, spare colloquial surfaces carry hidden depths . . . subtle and suggestive, working on several levels at once.Globe and MailThe cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart . . . Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent.Montreal GazetteA poem by Sarah could fit into the palm of your hand . . .Wherever We Mean To Beshowcases [her] gifts: her visual clarity, no-nonsense voice, compressed language, rhythmic prowess, and metaphoric agility. These qualities speak from a long-cultivated focus and bespeak a writer who pays fierce attention to the basic fact of being in the world.Anita Lahey,The WalrusSo assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience.Eric Ormsby