Customer Reviews

Shepherdess with an Automatic

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Poets must cringe when they run across these kinds of reviews (Salinger's Seymour Glass found the scribbling in the margins of library books most depressing)--who knows what to say about poetry, especially one who is a casual reader? But here one can at least say what one likes or dislikes.

I like this book of poems. In "Shepherdess with an Automatic" one finds short poems, usually no more than a page in length, that flash in your mind as if in recollection and that build upon each other to create a presence that suggests your past is much more than a burden to overcome--it is your inescapable undersong.

One finishing stanza that I think marvelous, from "Nocturne", "The trick is to remain unenticed by another:/not impressed, but not beyond impression,/adrift and at home in recognizable streets" is perhaps what seems most central to these poems and this poet.

In "Small Life" (I'd love to reproduce it, as it is my favorite and my wish for you to know it if you do not buy this book) the poet reflects upon a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, depicting a man, no more than a shadow of a man really, frozen in mid-air, about to step into the middle of a large puddle of water. "Is this//what it means to be immortal..."? "--See how the shadow below/stays close, attuned/like a soul or most perfect mimic." (A shadow, a soul, a mimic is "at home and adrift in recognizable streets.") After reading this several times I had to find a copy of the photograph (I've pasted it into my book!).

Satterfield's poems seem to hover just outside of experience, or rather, outside the reflection upon experience--apparitions returned to make sense of the past.

"I like to feel water slip/off the skin,/the lightness after/what cannot be lifted/is lifted."

"What is the body?//A barrier to the crossing."

"How I'd like to believe in hope,/but the past, it seems, is like gravity,/the force that keeps us in place."

At home and adrift but always in the same (recognizable) place.