Meridian (Tupelo Press Snowbound)
"Moving deftly in and out of 'the small apartment where my mother lay dying,' laced with memory and opened into aftermath,Meridianis a study, by a probing spirit, in darkness and snow, of private sorrow mirrored in larger patterns: of celestial passage, of excavations in the opened earth. Musically cadenced, contemplative, respectful of silence -- these taut, resonant lines bear not one extra ounce of language, but only and exactly what will suffice." --Eleanor Wilner"I have long considered Kathleen Jesme a truly remarkable poet. InMeridian, however, she outdoes herself. Jesme fills this lyric chronicle of the death of her mother with precise observations, strange silences, and breathtaking moments of beauty and music. Whether she dwells on the relentless snow whispering around the house or slips into crystalline recollection of her mother's slow failure, I sense in these poems a subtle mind at work on an unsolvable problem. For Jesme knows we can find neither clarity nor conclusion in the emptiness death leaves behind, but must always circle around it, reaching for meaning in the images and memories that surround us as we prepare to grieve, and then grieve. 'I am swimming toward you,' she writes late in the poem, 'through / the past / which clings to me / and holds me / back / and up.' Meridian is not merely a beautifully written, ambitious poem -- it is also the most moving I have read in a long time."--Kevin Prufer--Advance Praise