num_pages: 176
description: Five chapbooks in a hardcover sleeve make up SIGHTINGS, Volume IV of WALKING TO WINDWARD: POETS OF NEW ENGLAND (20 poets in 4 boxed volumes): L.R. Berger's, SIGHTINGS is " ....a stubborn, intelligent and affirming poetry. Her lines, like the birds she writes about, dart out of the shadows with such swiftness and grace we feel startled into perception." (Teresa Cader). With a striking cover drawing by Käthe Kollwitz, Deborah Brown's NEWS FROM THE GRATE, tells us that: "Like the hungry, thoughts line up/bedraggled, unsurprised, straggling forward./One of them thinks about work undone..../another thinks of a former lover..." another, a prayer, gnaws on gristle. She takes us from the thief in Afganistan, to laugh in a shtetl in Vilna and home again to the perfect tuna sandwich. In FEVER OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN Grace Mattern speaks of the events that have shaped her life and family, morning chores and a boy waiting for the bus, catching leaves in autumn. She has an acute sense of personal growth and of the beauty of our changing seasons. In Rhina P. Espaillat's MUNDO Y PALABRA ~THE WORLD AND THE WORD, translations from her English and Spanish poems, draw us to her grandson and father, each learning to speak "a new language," and her own bilingual outlook on the world enriched by the vocabulary of two tongues. "Watch that you don't run short of butterflies; learn the colors of the hours." Betsy Sholl's COASTAL BOP fulfills with her other books, Thelonius Monk's advisory that, "A man's a genius to look like himself. Play yourself." She never betrays her true feelings. "These poems admit all the musics that haunt our lives; everything with which we've tried to fill the ache left by the sound of trains when the trains didn't run anymore." (Jean Pedrick.)
language: English
title: Sightings
titlecomplete: Sightings (Walking to Windward: Poets of New England, Volume 4)
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Oyster River Pr