Rafting on the Water Table: Poems (Minnesota Voices Project, No. 96)

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Summary: Check out this book from a 2001 MN Book Award Nominee
Review: Rafting on the Water Table is a finely crafted, lovely, clear-thinking volume. "The wind has all the time in the world./ The sky goes on without you./ Do what the grasses do: keep thick/ your connections underground./ Then it's all right to give yourself over to fire./ You'll grow back from the base, surging/ from strong jolt of ash, grow into the wind/ headlong and blazing." (from "Prairie Meditations") These lines could have been written by James Wright. The reader comes away from this volume having learned something about experiencing the world. I look forward to future volumes from this poet.

Rating:
Summary: Check out this book from a 2001 MN Book Award Nominee
Review: Rafting on the Water Table is a finely crafted, lovely, clear-thinking volume. "The wind has all the time in the world./ The sky goes on without you./ Do what the grasses do: keep thick/ your connections underground./ Then it's all right to give yourself over to fire./ You'll grow back from the base, surging/ from strong jolt of ash, grow into the wind/ headlong and blazing." (from "Prairie Meditations") These lines could have been written by James Wright. The reader comes away from this volume having learned something about experiencing the world. I look forward to future volumes from this poet.

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Summary: Great narrative poems
Review: This collection of narrative poems is a good, fun (if fast) read.

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Summary: Poems for the middle of the night
Review: This is a strong debut by a promising poet. From the first poem to the last, Steger Welsh maintains a provocative voice that both engages and challenges the reader to look at the ordinary world and its "rules" in a new way. Whether she is dissecting grammar vis-a-vis God ("Grammar in the Kingdom of God") or exploring her own loss and grief through the rhythms of the natural world ("Laws of Falling Things"), this writer combines keen wit and grace to create deftly realized poems. She is particularly attentive to the natural world around her, the weather and trees and birds of her neighborhood, and uses her observations to create surprising and sometimes heartbreaking metaphors for love, marriage, loss, death. This book is a comfort and a joy to read. In her poem "Rapid Eye Movement", a meditation on dreams and their relation to reality, the last lines read: "On these waves come bobbing/coded ransom notes from the soul,/messages smuggled back to the dreamer, who in the morning, disbelieves." These poems are like those smuggled messages--illuminating yet mysterious, yielding more and more upon each reading.

Rating:
Summary: Wide range of warmth and wit, delightful and deep
Review: This prize-winning volume, Welsh's first publication of her fine poetry, rewards the reader greatly. It takes up everything from family relationships to scientific advances. Deft, artfully crafted, smooth-flowing--I loved it. If you want good contemporary poetry in your personal library, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Wide range of warmth and wit, delightful and deep
Review: This prize-winning volume, Welsh's first publication of her fine poetry, rewards the reader greatly. It takes up everything from family relationships to scientific advances. Deft, artfully crafted, smooth-flowing--I loved it. If you want good contemporary poetry in your personal library, this book is for you.