Poetry. Winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Publication Prize. "In her first book, Helen Wallace explores a range of subjects with lush language and a formal deftness that are deeply gratifying. If there is a presiding theme here, it is the tension between our `struggle for precision' and the poignant fact of the imperfection all around and within us. Whether celebrating domestic life or evoking global concerns, Wallace captures the beauty in what is flawed and the flaw in what is beautiful. `So much of what we love is born of loss,' she tells us. And while the world Wallace renders is a broken one, in these poems it has been honed to brightness on the strop of her passionate sensibility. This is a wonderful debut"--Enid Shomer.
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Shimming the Glass House, winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Prize, is Helen Pruitt Wallace's first collection of poems. Co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers published by Anhinga Press, Wallace has published poems in The Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Cumberland Review, Nimrod International, Tampa Review, and other journals. She's received a McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grasping...in a good way.,
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This review is from: Shimming the Glass House (Paperback)
I rarely reread literature anymore than I watch a movie twice; but, in all honesty, I read some of these poems to guests who come to my house, colleagues, family and family over the phone. The words grasp emotions that aren't necessarily ones you want to hold on to, but Wallace's expression of the emotion, somehow, creates an elevated and better perspective; one that allows the world to be okay, the way it is, through an understanding that is a gift from the author. Bravo!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Opulent Debut,
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This review is from: Shimming the Glass House (Paperback)
Helen Pruitt Wallace, a classmate of mine (C'80) at The University of the South in Sewanee TN, has made an opulent debut with Shimming the Glass House. The 57 poems (20 previously recognized with awards and publication) range in form from free verse to several fixed forms including sestina, ottava rima, (primarily Petrarchan) sonnets and what I like to call hidden sonnets--14 line poems whose argument follows that of a Petrarchan or Shakespearian sonnet but that omit some strict aspect of the form, usually the rhyme scheme. She also demonstrates a gift for inventing new forms, their inspiration growing directly from both her subject and argument. Many poems carry either dedications or epigraphs and a few enjoy the effective modern poetical device of using the title as the poem's first line. She takes great pleasure in customizing quotations from poets like Jesus ("In my mother's house are many pots"), Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden ("Auden's right about disaster, the way it often finds us / in the ordinary.") and W. B. Yeats, and she is obviously immersed, in her teaching life I assume, in Elizabethan rhetoric and Victorian vocabulary. The result is a rich smorgasbord of poems, most of which draw their inspiration from intensely personal observations of modern life, nature and work. Her success grows directly from her passion for specificity of details, welcoming the reader into her experience (many poems start with the first-person singular or plural pronoun)--which is somehow appropriate to the Southern belle she is.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and fragile,
By Poet Laureate In Training (Sandusky, OH - St. Petersburg, FL) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Shimming the Glass House (Paperback)
Her poems are beautiful and fragile, like a glass house, or life. A wonderful read.
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