Customer Reviews

What's Left

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As a person who finds poetry necessary to living, I live for moments like this--the moment I discover a poet whose work sweeps me down into the beautiful subconscious world, pulls my heart into my throat, and moves me with its painful joy and stunning grief. So little contemporary poetry goes this deep. Susan Sindall opens a quiet door to the other world--the real world--and invites you in. Her work touches me very deeply, and I'm grateful for it.

The dance of language shimmers from line to line in Susan Sindall's moving poems, even when the poet evokes immobility, as in "Offshore":

Low tide: the sandbar's tawny flank
lifts from the middle of the river....
Tethered skiffs hang exactly sideways.

Angels swing on Sindall's ladder-back chairs, coydogs "raise blunt ancient hatchet muzzles," and even the stones open their eyes ("the stone you gave me stares from my palm"), unflinching, visionary, in a universe that brims with loss and wonder. This is a beautiful book.

If you want to experience an intensely felt life filtered through singularly discriptive language buy this book.
Susan Sindall has a unique way of being in the world and the means to grab you by the collar
and tell you about it.

Maybe my favorite poems in Susan Sindall's new book are the long sequences, "Renovations" and "Mother Tongue," but I'm not sure. These haunting, sly, subtle, and charming - as in magic - poems negotiate all the ground between (and surrounding) life and death: what we know and what we don't know, what we once had, what we've lost, and what's left. What's left is the essence of experience, that is, love - captured here for a moment in the light and strong threads of poetry's net. To summarize (from the poem "Woodland Setting"):

You can't tell them
at these moments
how you love them;
they would burst into flames.

Courage and tenderness are on offer in WHAT'S LEFT, Poems by Susan Sindall. Not a how-to book, Sindall's collection teaches only by example. In "Getting into Stones" death and decay lose their terror when delivered in her gritty language-"Rubble clears its throat above me." Sindall breasts the disappointments of marriage, the fierce incendiary love of one's children, the death of friends--out ahead of us holding a torch.

Louise Farmer Smith

This is an extraordinary book. It is tiny, and it packs a wallop. Each poem is like the inner workings of an intricate Swiss timepiece: quiet, relentless, constant, jewel-like. For poetry-lovers, this is the holy grail. For anyone who is affected by what happens when certain words are put next to certain other words, look no further. Buy this book!

What's Left contains an implicit question. Exquisitely crafted delicate and quirky, this collection of poems accomplishes a kind of lace, opening spaces where threads remain. In poem after poem, the absences define what remains: "Questions I Left in Your Mailbox," "Tholos"--a tomb with its "Burnt siena smell/and gentle vacancy," "Reunion,"--in which two parents share the frailty of their children's health, "Fuscia"--with its summer love, "...heavenly balance days/before the sun sets earlier/in tiny increments allowing//the dark space of our aging to open." There are more formal elegiac poems, "Jubilate" --daughter mourning mother through small remembrances--the "...skinned apples/ whose tart, green spirals/dropped, intact, to the counter"--then releasing both in a small physical act. In "The Wake," Molly, newly dead, is the brightest presence in a very bright room. What's Left includes as well a small circle of friends who arrived through story and song: Schumann, Brahms, Athena. Every page of this book shimmers.