Leonard Cohen Passion and linguistic virtuosity are the first words that come to mind while reading Judith Fitzgerald's poetry. Through her writing, Fitzgerald has always been able to rip your heart out, even as your brain knows all about it and why the heartbroken de Rais questioning everything in the world, and his unrequited song for the Bride of Christ. One of our most important poets because she writes and thinks her poetry like no one else.
River is an ambitious illustration of the contents of the mind of North America .
A look inside the minds of late twentieth-century North America. Although Rapturous Chronicles is similarly steeped in the waters of Liffey, Fitzgerald's runic Rorschach here discloses rather than obscures her meanings. Like Joyce, Fitzgerald writes more with aural than with visual imagery. The polyphonic layeredness of Fitzgerald's text portrays the way we normally exist, with our feelings, memories, associations, perceptions, and concerns cluttering and connecting in non-linear process. Against the polyphony of consciousness, Fitzgerald poses the structuring impulse, a desire to come, through writing, to greater understanding, and to give, as well, adequate lyric expression to the dignities and reality of life, love, and grief.