“In these precise and lovely poems, Roselyn Elliott brings the quiet, fog-laden backroads of memory back to life. Full of rich language, vivid imagery of landscape and home, and the hard-won lessons of long love and long living, Elliott’s poetry is warm reassurance of what can be gained from careful observation of the self in the world.”
–Amy Tudor, author of A Book of Birds and Studies in Extinction
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Roselyn Elliott takes the world as it comes. Her poetry weaves the paradox of pain and loss with the beauty and hope nature also contains. The title poem presents a healing eye –metaphorically and literally – with this perception from a plane journey: “Oh life, carry us through our flashes / of astonishment without harm”… Hurtling across firmament, faith stretched/ across fabric of space…..” Absence and presence are held sacred in the moment when someone departed is portrayed as a “gray shadow / blowing across my sister’s living room,… “Living dust, visible energy” brushing against family members as they “fold towels,” perform domestic tasks. Roselyn’s discerning eye, masterful language and generosity of spirit are a gift in a world that seldom offers un-shadowed joy.
–Judy Longley, author of MY JOURNEY TOWARD YOU and A WOMAN DIVIDED.
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
The power of metaphor is the magic of poetry, and in Roselyn Elliott’s Ghost of the Eye, in the sleight of hand of the nicely unpredictable moves of her language, dangerous realities weave into intense phrasings, a crashing flood becomes “a breathless runner pounding from behind, cracking branches”—but she’s not done—as that runner, no mere athlete, is revealed as a predator in the next turn of metaphor, and “rapids stood on their haunches and roared.” A precise observer who examines even her own vision, she sees there an “old companion: brown shadow” as she looks out at clouds, flying home, and that fellow floater, a ghost in the eye, becomes “sometimes a small brown dog / lifting onto its hind feet, pawing the air,” yet also “now, a long, languid cloud promising rain,” as Elliott finds the way to bring a metaphor home, back to its ground in a necessary real.
–Gregory Donovan, author of Torn from the Sun
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
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