Description
Kind: Perfectbound
Pages: 78
Language: English
Published: August, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939929-15-0
Praise
“Who were the flies,
and who the wanton boys?…
We have a savage language.,”
writes Sarah White in her poem called “ On the Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words.” No, you don’t read a title like that every day; and no, you have rarely read a more dexterous, visceral, literate, witty, sorrowful use of our sweet and savage language than White’s new collection, THE UNKNOWING MUSE.
“Il pleure.. comme il pleut” :
“…. where a man
weeps his wasted years
and his heart
breaks into assonance.”
—Estha Weiner
Sarah White is all that a good poet should be- smart, funny, daring. She redefines the familiar, giving new aspects to themes as commonplace as love and motherhood, standing beside her son in a courthouse, or advising her children that, as a poet, she has other work to do. Following her, we end up in unexpected places, in the graveyard where Baudelaire is buried, or in Purgatory itself, …. an island in the Southern Sea, where sin can be handled, deftly. You go with her through poems that assume their own heft and place on the page- “I can step next door/to see Vesuvian flames/and hear the roar”, confident she’ll not leave you stranded, even as she quips, “I tip to one side when I walk”. —Mervyn Taylor
We can tell, from these lines and the ones in between, how much our poet loves language, over and beside all other loves in her life; and we can tell that—sh..!—she’s having an affair with Occitan. Somehow I find it entirely justified, for just as those modern Occitan poets are avatars of the medieval troubadours and their amor de lonh, Sarah White is a paradigm of the modern trobairitz. —Ricardo Nirenberg
Author
Sarah White studied French and Italian at Harvard and the University of Michigan, specializing in medieval Language and Literature. Before her retirement she was a Professor of French at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She now lives in New York, writing and painting
