Opalesence,
Poems by Judith Skillman
Judith Skillman’s
lyric poems have their own luminescence, and in her new collection,
Opalescence, they shimmer with
depth and dazzle with brilliance, always with careful and invisible
craft.
Sample Poems by Judith Skillman
“In Opalescence, Judith
Skillman blends the two arts of poetry writing and stained-glass making
into a powerful and highly original book. As the stained glass artisan,
for her art, endures the injuries that heat and the cutting edges of
glass and metal can inflict, so Skillman endures the pain of exploring
the obscure recesses of her personal past within a web of historical,
mythical, and biblical allusions that weave through the book holding
it together as the web of lead cames weaves through and holds together
a piece of stained glass. In these poems, she shores the fragments of
memory and emotion against the sure oblivion of the future, just as
the stained glass artisan assembles a luminous mosaic from an apparent
chaos of glass shards. In Opalescence,
Judith Skillman lets us see through her to ourselves, not as through
a glass darkly, but with glorious light.”—Stephen Meats,
The Midwest Quarterly
“In Opalescence, Judith
Skillman brings the light that shimmers through stained glass to poetry
of the human and natural world. The poems in this book are themselves
like marvels of stained glass in their nuances of color, the juxtapositions
of feeling and image into all their potentials, in how each poem reflects,
refracts, and enhances the others.”—Joan Swift
“Skillman’s poems move out from their opening point meditatively
and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other
countries, and also mythologies and similarities…Skillman’s
poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads;
and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together
by qualities similar and different.”—Small
Press Book Review
“You get the idea from Skillman there’s a lot more going
on than that’ll escape us if we construct our lives from nothing
more than the four basic building blocks of the daily grind: work, chow,
TV, sack time. A fifth element, and one that makes life worth living
in these poems is awareness, something we are likely to encounter if
we create the time and quiet that are otherwise missing.”—David
Kirby
ISBN 1932339566, 80 pages, $17.00