Horses in the Cathedral
Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (2010)
| The poems in Kimberly Burwick's Horses in the Cathedral challenge the conventional esthetics of the poetic line in nuanced and subtle ways. Burwick's music yields great and unexpected beauty, insights garnered by long and patient scrutiny. More importantly, though, these poems surprise perception and offer the lover of books that rare gift -- a mysterious world we can return to again and again, with each visit our experience augmented.
-- Brian Turner, Judge, 2010 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry |
| It's not just that these vivid, sometimes anxious, sometimes faith-full, consistently gorgeous lyrics surprise us, but that we don't know how they will surprise next. Image? Deliciously archaic word choice? Sudden wit or disarming sincerity? These and more make this meditation in nature's church a compelling read, as the speaker seeks to evolve beyond mere survival, to see abundance and live with abandon, "to see what the partridge sees" and to answer the call to be "a part of plenty."
-- April Ossmann |
| Each animal is the abstraction that goes through me: so Burwick says of those horses. Burwick, who won the Robert Dana Prize for Poetry with this book, writes spare, lyric verse that does plumb abstraction, but only by working through pitch pine and yellowwood, hands/ clayey with milk and magnolia. A fresh new sense of the pastoral.
-- Barbara Hoffert (Library Journal) |
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Cover art: Blue Horse, 30" X 30" oil on canvas, by Laurie Justus Pace
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