Walking Across the Pacific by Judy Bebelaar

Old love and new love, the perishings of the past that inform the quiet but persistent appreciations of the present—in this small book Judy Bebelaar considers large subjects in a voice that modulates bittersweet elegy with subtle praise. “The only balm,” she says, is “the sadness of song,” and after tragedies like the World Trade Center and Fukushima, she recalls the ominous smoke against the sky’s blue eminence and our responsibility to speak of, and to, the unspeakable, as difficult as that attempt may be: “we have to try/to say the blue and the dark/in spite of.” But elsewhere she is inspired by the finches that “have fledged,/moved on,/so tiny and trim,/so focused on being alive”—much like the speaker of “Lucky Turns,” who counts her share of good fortune, after so many disheartening deaths, and is grateful. As a title, “Walking Across the Pacific” suggests the presence of magic, the miraculous, as if in defiance of what might sink us. These poems assert that the wonder is all around us and within us, no sleight-of-hand-required.

–Thomas Centolella, author of Terra Firma, Lights and Mysteries, and Views from along the Middle Way

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In Judy Bebelaar’s poems, you will find vision, wisdom and joy – gliding “thigh to thigh in the narrow seat” of a small plane. You will swim in salty water with “two dolphins forming a yin-yang,” a litany of surfboards. You will be blessed by “all the dolphins who have rescued drowning humans.” In Judy Bebelaar’s poems, you will find “the light that explodes inside when you’re making love.” Your heart will open to “the slow blessing of the Hopis, their small rafts over silk water making the ground sacred for movement.” This is a book to savor and reread. Threaded through her words, you will discover “metamorphosis, transcendence, transmigration.”

–Diane Frank, Poet and Novelist, Author of Blackberries in the Dream House

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

“In compelling language and memorable images, the poems in Walking Across the Pacific tell the ancient stories of sorrow and guilt, love and loss, and love again. Judy Bebelaar is a meticulous observer who notices how ‘the squirrels beginning to nibble/at the green persimmons,/and finding them bitter,/throw them down.’ She deftly draws us into her world.”

–Lucille Lang Day, author of Married at Fourteen: A True Story, The Curvature of Blue, and Infinities

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]