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Miracles of Sainted Earth (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, 1)

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This poetry collection is deeply moving for the modern person that wants to imagine life's possibilities. Tester's voice soothes the soul... her poetry is palpable in it's imagery. In one poem she takes an everyday object and imagines what the history may have been, another she lets her mind wander through her imagination as she drives down a scenic highway, while yet another relates a most painful memory of angst and suffering from true events in her life.

This poetry book is one I count among a few as my true poetic loves. I'm looking forward to reading her second volume of poetry.

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Miracles of Sainted Earth (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, 1)
by Victoria Edwards Tester

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= A REAL VOICE, UNDERSTANDABLE, ELOQUENT, LIKE MARY OLIVER
Reviewer: Glenn G. Boyer from Tucson,, AZ USA
This is a poet of universal understanding, as all should be, but so few are. When you first dip into this poetry you follow a most unusual spirit inside and outside and around what she knows, and she knows what Winston Churchill knew - we are first and foremost spirit - that we never die because we are a part of everything. Even Victoria Tester's Index turned out to be poetry, whether she knew it or not, because when she writes that's what she writes.

It is often impossible to follow great lyric language, or wade through the imagery that became substance instead of form in modern poetry. Imagery here takes us back to Whitman, the first American poet of the land, and what it nurtures - life, strong life, boisterous life, celebrating itself as the gift of God that it is. You have no trouble understanding what is written here, and to know that the writer experienced it. Though there is inevitable acknowledgment of pain, and despair, which are part of life, most of all there is the underlying, wonderful life, of which despair is usually not a dominant part. We are reminded here that suffering is made endurable by the hope that life will go on and become better, and we will again live to celebrate life at its best. There is a voice here that says, "when all else fails you in extremis, reach out and you will touch God because He is always there, though we often forget that when things are going well."

Here is a poet that brings to life what England's poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson meant when he wrote: "Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream." There are dreams here, "magic realism," strong spiritual acknowledgement, but the dreams in which they are encountered are never empty.

Tester's life is joy, affirmation, an invitation to rush into the world and holler, "Ain't life wonderful, and full of wonders?"

How she does this with such incredible eloquence without obscuring a clear understanding would puzzle me except that I have seen often enough how God gives a gift to a very very few, to share with the rest of us. You will read these poems over and over and become stronger for it, be comforted, because faith flies out from every page.

Definitely Pulitzer quality, but most of us know how hard it is to be noticed by the august Committee that conferred on LAUGHING BOY the big one and ignored LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL.