Customer Reviews

Design (The Colorado Prize)

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St. Anselm's motto (I believe that I may understand) centers the sharp movements, the honest ontological concerns, of this knockout first book. Intense observation stained by a giving over of the subjective to landscape, to the pool of the moment, allow Sally Keith to operate a voice at once omnicient and stunningly interior. The forms here are open and accomplished. At times a tense dimeter-driven line is packed with sense data and the metaphysic (not the Post-postmodern) interruption:

"Mid-morning's wrens/ wrap my house (frantic/ fealty) in chords of flight// ephemeral--voiced./ Branched things (I/ stretched too far)"

She also exhibits, in more discursive poems, a hard-earned understanding of white space. In her composition, she indulges no arbitrary or purely visual placements, but uses space as a genuine extension of perception and mode--terribly rare among poets of any age group. To say how these forms engage the book's large ambitions, and how enjoyable that engagement is, would take a review too lengthy for digestion. In my mind, this book places the poet among a handful (if that) of genuine artists in the craft under the age of thirty-five. This is not a debut, but a revelation.

Sally Keith's first collection presents the reader with the rare--ever too rare--treat of finding in your own mind the vision of her honest poetic eye. It is an eye that searches through nature for knowledge--not the type of knowledge that one walks away from with the profit of fact, but rather, that humble knowledge of finding yourself always involved and complicated by the world she's gazing at. Each poem feels a step into a snow-covered field, and rather than glorify the act by noticing the footprint, she notices instead how the horizon retreats a step further away as she nears. Keith innately senses that the eye atuned to the natural is also nature's eye. And yet, as a lover to the beloved, the poet longs for the distance by which to behold and see truly that which she loves. (I can even sense the unexpected solution: how the world gazes back, lovingly, at her.)

She is a poet of humble audacity--any serious reader will count him or herself lucky for the conversation of reading.