A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky-that gap in which we live, the space words make. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. Poetry Gods and Other Mortals Precisely etched meditations on public and private experience, charged landscapes and reconceived Greek myths.
Words are signals, flares sent up in desperation, a cryptic language of longing.
Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios is a work in the hazard of retrieval. Seldom what you would expect, not always the happiness. Helen Humphreys comes through the rich reproach of the past into the present, a bruise, a beautiful bloom. In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography , Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then.