To the Sound by Vivian Eyre

I love how To The Sound carries the weight and heft that all lives must carry—the joys and sorrows of what we too dismissively call “ordinary life”. At the same time this weight finds a home for itself inside the larger context of a mysterious world whose saving news comes to us in these heartfelt, honest, and imaginative poems. To The Sound is a wonderful book.

–Jim Moore, author of six previous books including Invisible Strings

Vivian Eyre’s poems work by their fierce concision and exceptional sense of rhythmic pulse. Whether her ear is tuned to the sorrow we will all one day know or the sharp-edge of her line, the powerful stories in these poems fall on the ears with solace: salt of the undertaken like stains on a crumpled list.

–Juliet Patterson, author of The Truant Lover and Threnody

Vivian Eyre’s pen is precise, scratching darkness into light and back to umber again, as she writes of love, land, sea and family. Her lines are lean yet suffused with wonder. In “Empty Cup,” a poem after Pierre Bonnard’s Breakfast Room, she writes, “A doorway is still a doorway / an imprecise measure of departure.” And in “Window Fishing,” she captures a night of casting with her father: “August rain. Red snapper hooked through the eye/ Window fishing from a fin-tailed Buick.” And my favorite lines, from “What Follows”: “Blood pulses enough for a jog down Commonwealth / into kites of pollen. Coughing tightens the string.” Eyre’s command of language and phrasing caresses a reader into the poems and in To The Sound.

–Ed Stever, Suffolk County Poet Laureate (2011–2013) author of Transparency
and Propulsion

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]