The Coast Starlight, Poems by Belle Randall
The cool, elegant rhymes in Belle Randall's The Coast Starlight hold up their subjects to close regard, creating finely etched renderings that hold the gaze: "Bereft of words,/The mind still keeps its distance and observes."
"Even when not reading poems, I can hear her voice, thrown from who-knows-where, emerging from below the couch or behind a creaking door...the defining trait of her verse--that her language stains the reader's mind--is one she shares with outsized Americans, above all Dickinson, Eliot, and Bob Dylan."--Jeffrey Perl
"After the second reading I felt as if I had been through a whole novel, as well, at the same time, as a book of philosophical thinking of the kind I love most. ... It's been a long time--since Berkeley days the time I was teaching there--that I have known Rilke's line 'Beauty is but the beginning of terror' ... but after 'The Beautiful Informer' I know more about it, and about other things, than I had before."--Stanley Cavell
Belle Randall attended the University of California (Berkeley), where the poet Thom Gunn was her Freshman English teacher (1960). A decade later, she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford, where she completed her first full-length book of poems One Hundred and One Different Ways of Playing Solitaire, published in 1973 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals - Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Triquarterly and PN Review (England). Her most recent chapbook is True Love, from Wood Works Press (2003).