The Glamorganshire Bible by Lynne Viti

The Glamorganshire Bible is written in lines of free but measured verse, plain as daylight, plain as truth. It invents Viti’s ancestors and their places and situations, what they did and didn’t do. The writing verifies what it invents. I can hear the sound a coffee cup makes as it descends upon its saucer. I know that Chevy was green and white. I know how that mother leaned to look into the mirror. That’s how she looked. It’s true.

–David Ferry

In this compelling and cinematic suite of poems, Lynne Viti shows us women who attempt to untie the strictures and circumstances that would confine and define them. Here are finely wrought details in vivid interlocking narratives.  Here is a genealogy of initial pregnant silences, insistent voices of the past, and astute perceptions of the present.

—Danielle Legros Georges, Poet Laureate, City of Boston

The wages of time–remembrance and oblivion, place names and lost motives–come to graceful life in these poems. The impulse is commemorative; the tone, at once lingering and alert, speaks for days that must add up to something–and sometimes do.

–Baron Wormser

Lynne Viti’s poems transport us to another place and time, into the beauty and desperation of a western Maryland railroad town a century ago. She mends the “broken kaleidoscope” of memory through the power of her own imagination, channeling the voice of “our grandma, young and wild” who became a wife and mother far too soon. The story grips us, and words rend our hearts as Viti chronicles three generations of women seeking love, escape, freedom, and connections with one another.

—Erin Royston Battat, Wellesley College

The Glamorganshire Bible is a journey back to a childhood where coal mines, railroad depots, adultery, drinking binges, supper of “bread soaked in milk,” churches, two-dollar dresses and desertion are only some of the hard-core, radioactive elements in these remarkable, gritty poems. Viti’s skill at crafting poetry out of wreckage and pain without sentiment is superb.

–Lenny Della Rocca, South Florida Poetry Journal