Bøger udgivet af Antrim House Books

Brooke Herter James' Spring Took the Long Way Around is a beautiful collection, each poem resonant with the strum of country life. These are poems of gentle reverence, skirting on the "dark edges of... wildness," the awareness of shadow giving each moment depth. They speak of family, of nature, of adolescent angst - she deftly captures this in the tone-perfect "Southbound, Maine Turnpike, Labor Day" - of illness and death. These quiet, skillful poems help us to slow down, to savor and notice. Sit down with this book, enjoy the peaceful acceptance of what is now, and of what we all will one day lose. Bask, for now, in James' gentle spring.

Linda Spock's gracious gathering of poems offers each of us a lifeline. Here, in the midst of life's challenges, much joyful solace is found. The power of love is always present, not least of all in Lifelines' central group of poems about a much anticipated grandson, who offers all of us the same delight, laughter, and revival felt by the author. Like the spider in "Spider Woman," Linda Spock knows how to make her lines "dance rather than break." How lucky we are to be invited to the dance.

The Fire in Hand is a gorgeous, complex collection of poetry, and what an extraordinary eye for detail Karen Torop has. Whether she is praising the beauty of "two / high-seated tractors," exploring the essential contradiction of loving both her cat and the beautiful rose-breasted grosbeak killed by the cat-"the rose-red / on its breast a bib of blood"-or watching her mother approaching death, her "bones loosely covered, mean as spokes," Torop's gift to us is her insistence that we must pause, look beyond habit, in order to love the world in all its glorious contradictions.

The Orchard House is a transcendent book replete with lyric poems not just regarding the human interface with nature but something infinitely more. Richard Shaw's poems are meditations that develop into mystical experience through keen observation. His vision is akin to W. S. Merwin's in his book of odes, Present Company; and his sensibilities viv à vis the natural world remind one of Theodore Enslin's or Mary Oliver's. The Orchard House is a book to savor; in it, Shaw creates an enduring image of the fortitude of our heart being similar to that of a lighthouse that contains "one enormous reflector / like the one we sometimes feel / at the back of the chest." The aesthetic ethos of The Orchard House might be best represented in the conclusion of the poem "August Stars," whose startling sidereal beauty is "an annunciation / electric / through twilit air." - Wally Swist, author of Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love and The Map of Eternity What better abode for a nature poet than a house in the middle of an old apple orchard? As Emily Dickinson would put it, Richard Shaw has learned to "see-New Englandly-." The natural world of New England quickens within him in these quietly rhapsodic poems. His unpunctuated lines convey breathlessness, silences, and ecstasy. As for Dickinson and Robert Francis, those New England poets who are his forebears, solitude is his muse. He places his poems "in the chipped / upturned bowl // time spent alone / has fashioned me into." What a generous vessel is this poet, this book that contains fox skulls, Bach cello suites, scarlet tanagers, tiger lilies, Vermeer, black ice, katydids, rain, stars. - Donald Platt, author of Man Praying and Tornadoesque