The Pattern Maker's Daughter: Poems
Sandee Gertz Umbach's The Pattern Maker's Daughter is a remarkable debut collection full of honesty, wisdom, and heart. Like a fine photographer, she has empathy for her subjects, an eye for the telling detail, and a commitment to the truth. She brings this community to life from an insider' perspective--these are her people, though the love she brings to these poems never slides into sentimentality or idealizing--they never lose the necessary grit. In these finely wrought poems, danger and trauma exist in the landscape, in the homes, and in the very bodies of her characters. These are simply the stories we tell each other to stay alive.-Jim DanielsOn our life journey, there's a struggle to move forward and travel back, an ache we canalmost name. Sandee Gertz Umbach throws a rope to the past, rescues her people fromtheir floods and hungers, as her words create "golden spells of light." Luminous as anyporch light, she hands us true and tender poems. --Jeanne Bryner, author of Eclipse: StoriesIn well-made poems full of luscious sounds and pulsing details, Sandee Gertz Umbach discovers her inheritance of pattern-making in the steel mills and working-class neighborhoods of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Where her father made patterns, "preparing wooden replicas/of what steel would cast and harden," she now forges poems, formal or free, tight lyrics or expansive narratives, that explore both her personal history and the historical record of this working-class city. - Neil Shepard