Customer Reviews

Green Stars

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A quiet, well crafted and sensitive first book of poems. Very nicely done.

I read this book slowly, savoring several poems each day over the course of the week. The poems speak quietly and deeply; many of the images seeped into me and stayed there, particularly in the poems evoking childhood memories of her mother. I feel very grateful that Charlotte Matthews' poems are in the world!

When I travel, I tend to gather books, a half dozen perhaps, to take with me upon my trip. They serve as familiar words to read before bed, comfort, entertainment. For the past year I have found that I consistently place Green Stars in my travel basket.

Charlotte Matthews' poems speak to me in a voice that lingers - I'll carry a phrase with me throughout my day, the way one hears a line of a song over and over after listening.

Matthews' is a skilled observer of life: fields and sky, livestock and cloth, children and parents, she notes their perfections and imperfections in a way that opens eyes to another way of seeing these everyday things.

Matthews' book, like many others being published these days, suffers from the dreaded workshop flu. These observations, unfortunately, fail to rise above the everyday, because it's as if anything strange, unusual, vivid or unique has been edited out. She's a careful craftswoman, but the ephianies remain buried in a system of images and symbols that don't tell us anything new. It's a shame, and a disappointment, that she doesn't trust her own voice more thoroughly. For a book in a similar style that soars above to truly engage, try Claudia Emerson's the Late Wife.

Charlotte Matthews book is filled with haunting images and beautiful language. It is enduring.

Charlotte Matthews' beautifully-designed book has a cover painting by John Borden Evans of sheep grazing over a curve of earth against dizzying stars. Apt images for the book's exquisite and courageous blend of light in darkness, metaphysics grounded in a loving attention to nature and human connection. A great pleasure of reading Green Stars is learning about a woman we become fond of, Matthews' mother, whose presence in absence pervades the book. The book is full of bereavement yet allows us to enjoy the encounter with this woman, so loving and devoted to her children, who on car rides counts houses, "each a reassurance that life could be ordinary" (Sunday Drives), who writes down what her children are wearing when they go on errands so "if we never came home/ she would know exactly how to describe us" (How My Mother Waited). These balances between safety and danger, known and unknown, gains and losses are shown time and again in the fine poems of this compelling book.