(Plain View Press, 2009)
With lyric ease and a naturalist’s eye, Beth Paulson’s poems guide us into landscapes of longing and deep presence. Hers is a relentless and calm recording of a life of gratitude tinged with personal complexity and concern for the future of an unsettled planet. In reveries that span time and continents, she ultimately brings the reader home to the simplest sources of love— animal, human, mountain and river. Paulson’s spirit is wide-hearted and these poems are essential succor in unsteady times.
Barbara
Rockman,
author of to cleave, winner of the National Press Women Poetry
Prize, and Sting and Nest, winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book
Award
(Ponderosa Press, 2004)
“The world keeps
giving back,” Beth Paulson notes, giving voice to a sensitivity
and thoughtfulness about nature that has become uncommon in
American poetry. Not that she writes “nature poetry.” She writes
about what’s near at hand, from illness and loss to practicing
Beethoven, from a neighbor’s persimmons to the breakup of river
ice in spring. Wherever Beth Paulson looks she finds the healing
and balance we all need. Poem after poem, she takes the luminous
into herself and gives it back to us in words. What a gift….
Joseph
Hutchison,
Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019
(Kelsay Books 2021)