“What are we made of?” is the question posed by Laurie Elizabeth Lambert in these poems of nature, family, loss, and redemption. Organized by the seasons, Lambert reminds us that in spite of the darkness, our world contains trout lilies, trilliums, great blue herons, bluebirds, cardinals, woodpeckers, coffee, toast, butter. . . In the poem “In the Key of Chocolate,” she tells us “chocolate is a woman’s song,” and boy, does she have that right. She gives us “these moments that make a life, / that make me want to draw breath again and again / and see what happens next,” and we, her readers, are eager to see what does happen, in the next poem.
–Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems
The secret life of calm, the secrets of the quiet, and the hidden stories of every day: that is what Laurie Elizabeth Lambert gives us in this honest book of poems. Confessional, autobiographical, transparent, What We Are Made Of is a collection of moments of pause and observation in the middle of the daily routine. If it wasn’t for the poem, we would never guess how many ghosts there are in every kitchen or how much love in every morning. It is a poetic memoir, a recollection of the intimate. It is an extremely personal book, and yet, we can all relate to the feelings in every poem: fear, love, thankfulness, and the desire to understand life, to make sense of it.
Laurie Elizabeth Lambert has taken our feelings and desires (which are hers) and made a book with them.
–Manuel Iris, Cincinnati Poet Laureate, author of Translating Silence
In times of transition Laurie Elizabeth Lambert goes to the woods and the river. There, in their intimate expanse, this poet of deep feeling walks, sits, and swims her way through a mid-life season with trepidation and gusto, exploring the “bread” and the “fudge” of her life. Her poetry, rich with birdsong and the scent of forest and meadow, beckons us to accompany her as she takes in the dogged drumming of a pileated woodpecker and learns “stillness/ from the blue heron /silent /on the river bank/ self-folding origami.” The poems in this collection, though intensely personal, open generously to us, as if to say Come, walk my barnyard labyrinth, and rest with me under the ginkgo. The task, hers and ours, is both to honor what we are made of and to welcome what we will become.
–Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, author of The Bridge Has No Railings
Sara C. Pranikoff (verified owner) –
This beautiful collection of poems offers the warm companionship of walking the woods with a best friend keenly attuned to the natural world and to the seasonal turnings of our inner and outer lives.
It left me with a renewed sense of ‘what we are made of’—the joys, burdens, and hopes—the leaves, feathers, stones—and a renewed appreciation for how our deeper stories are revealed/ echoed in the small happenings in the natural world and in one another’s lives.