Rough Fugue: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) - Tapa blanda

Broadly speaking, these poems are about love and loss, grief and haunted memory, reflections on an earlier, inherited world commingled with a contemporary experience whose meaning resists easy claims. And yet there is always an ethereal quality lighting up this exhilarating book, whose focus is inevitable darkness. The light comes through in the occasional poems that rhyme and fall into rough meter. And that implies a belief that something meaningful is always coming round, a recurrent beauty, a recurring image to savor and test. Nothing in this book--which presents a mastery of craft and vision--is easy, and no one, the poet included, would want it otherwise. At the end of this personal and artistic struggle, however, unaccountably, is joy. And that is a just conclusion. This book reminds us again and again what poetry is for. What a humbling and quieting inspiration it is.--Maurice Manning

After her husband's death, Betty Adcock learned 'to see in the dark.' This arresting new volume of poems contains light and dark, joy and sorrow, along with 'beautiful things / and the words that wake them.' In line after perfect line, Adcock revisits a history both personal and intensely universal, with unforgettable moments like the one on an empty winter porch where birdsong cuts 'the morning to gold ribbons' and makes readers listen more attentively to the 'rough fugue' of the world.--Peter Makuck

Betty Adcock's poems have always taken us instantly, elegantly, to a deeper, clearer mind and place of being. Uncluttered, resonantly perfect, visually impeccable--holding all that is both present and gone--Rough Fugue is a triumph of love and continuing.--Naomi Shihab Nye