Consider
the Lilies, Poems by Sarah Kennedy
Consider
the Lilies by Sarah Kennedy is a collection of gritty lyrics and
mournful narratives, the poems not shying away from painting portraits
tough in their attention to detail, yet delicate in the way they capture
emotional nuance. Poetry about the personal does not get richer than Kennedy’s
smooth, readable lines.
Sample Poems by Sarah Kennedy
Sarah Kennedy is
the author of three previous volumes of poetry: Double Exposure (Cleveland State, 2003;
winner of the Cleveland State Open Manuscript Competition),
Flow Blue (Elixir Press; winner of the 2001 Poetry Prize competition),
and From the Midland Plain (Tryon, 1999).
She is also co-editor (with R. T. Smith) of an anthology: Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia
(UVA Press, 2003). Her poems have won the Florida Review, Nebraska
Review, and Flyway awards for poetry, and her reviews, essays, and poems
are recent or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Hunger Mountain,
Pleiades, and West Branch, among others. Sarah Kennedy holds
a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Purdue University and an M.F.A.
in poetry from Vermont College. She is the book review editor for
Shenandoah and teaches Creative
Writing and Early British Literature at Mary Baldwin College.
“Sarah Kennedy not only exorcises demons but turns a Bible-bedeviled
past with ‘home-grown horrors’ into art that moves, matters,
and enthralls. Like a gripping novel, this is a book you won’t want
to put down until you’ve read to the last stunning page.”—Susan
Ludvigson
“‘Great hungers feed themselves,’ said Dickinson. Like
the field flowers of the parable, orphaned but sustained by grace, the
poems of Consider the Lilies are whetted with a desire for survival and
for the beautiful that is both implacable and quenching. This book is
a circuit ride—part fugue-state, part pilgrimage—that takes
us through the ambages—the seductions, droughts, guilt, and redemptions—of
failed marriages, ‘home-grown horrors,’ and the ruthless politics
of academia, dysfunctional family life, religion, right-wing America,
and, most crucially, the human heart. ‘December,’ a poem from
the ferociously tender, vulnerable sequence ‘Rapture (A Pastoral),’
which chronicles a year of predatory stalking, fear, and healing, the
speaker says: ‘I push an orange-stuffed hen / to the fire, sit beneath
my tree and shred / gifts of pearls and pills—what a surprise!—
/ that I wrapped for myself last month. Ribbons fly— / what could
this one be?—I am my own child, / beloved and showered with brightness.’
Fed by their own intelligence and lyricism, these luminous poems startle
us with their collided worlds, their radiant brokenness, their surprising,
ransomed happiness: ‘You’ll say it was strange,’ Kennedy
writes, ‘but what / had ever come closer to perfect joy?’—Lisa
Russ Spaar
“For all of you lyric poem aficionados who still don’t believe
a poem can tell the hell out of a story, ring the bell on the readability
meter, and still ride roughshod on breathtaking turns of phrase, satisfying
endings, full-blooded characters running a black comedy gauntlet through
riveting family situations Houdini couldn’t have escaped, welcome
to Sarah Kennedy’s Consider the
Lilies.”—Roger Weingarten
ISBN 193233940x, 88 pages, $17.00