Little Girls In Church (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Kathleen Norris (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kathleen Norris is best known for Dakota, her nonfiction book of "spiritual geography." This collection works much the same territory. Norris finds the sacred in the simple as in the poem "Hide and Seek," in which "A thunderclap/ rakes the field of sleep," and becomes a consecration. "Perennials" is a wonderful poem about the undeserved grace from a neglected garden. As the title suggests, this book balances fragility with power, in form and in content.

From Publishers Weekly

Norris, whose poetry collections include The Middle of the World, reached a wide audience with her prose memoir Dakota, A Spiritual Geography. Readers of that book will recognize here her closely considered relationship with the prairie; her persistent and delighted spiritual questioning; her respectful identification with other women both ordinary and extraordinary; and her joy in stories. She writes of love in various forms, without losing her sense of critical discernment. In a poem dedicated to poet Elizabeth Kray, Norris is at a funeral home, where taped music is played: "violins sliding through 'The Way We Were.'/ 'Please turn the music off,' I said, civilly,/ to the undertaker's assistant." Civility marks her views here, whether she is imagining "Young Lovers with Pizza" or considering ordinary, luminous events in poems written for, and to, friends. Their apparent simplicity wrought with subtlety and resonance, Norris's poems are characterized by generosity and compassion, as plain and spacious as the prairie life that has engendered many of them.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (May 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822955563
• ISBN-13: 978-0822955566
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #953,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. An oblate of Assumption Abbey, Norris divides her time between Hawaii and South Dakota.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems that point to God everywhere - even unlikely places, October 18, 1999

By 

Ginny Markowski (Succasunna, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Little Girls In Church (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Kathleen Norris has captured those moments when the questions and the search come into contact with the Living God in unlikely and serindipitous ways. "Imperatives" is succinct, glorious and the essence of Christian belief.

Her theology is pure, concise and completely without "party line" interference. "Lovers with Pizza" and "She Said Yeah" among others validate those "God moments" which are profound and true, but don't quite seem to fit with what we've learned in church.