Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson

Spare language, compressed emotion—the power of the unsaid balanced against the exactitude of what is expressed—allow Barbara Siegel Carlson’s new poems to take on significant weight with each word, each jagged edge, shimmering with multiple meanings. Many of these poems reside in a moment of eternal brevity, in silent rooms, after the light has left, and in the stillness between sleeping and the dead/the flying and  the feather that lies on the ground. Fragmented dreamscapes examine what remains, what feels adequate in disassembling and reconstructing the past. Between the Hours  is a stunningly beautiful book.

–DZVINIA ORLOWSKY, author of Bad Harvest

Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson is an alluring collection of powerfully contemplative poems and prose poems that explore timeless interstices, imagining and inhabiting the spaces between moments, the pauses between present, past and future. Here the poet can see into the dark and brilliant heart of things, the paradoxical infinities found in windy nights, sleep, bones, a bog before dawn, remembered houses with undiscovered rooms, where a birthday is “a bookmark in a book without words” and the light of late winter is “deep in our bones, where we first sprouted / from the light.” Jack Gilbert, W. S. Merwin and Tu Fu, Heraclitus, the astronomer Olbers, Joan of Arc, Billie Holiday, and Chekhov emerge like apparitions during these luminous lyrical excursions through the deep distance between our bodies and the objects and spaces that surround us. These texts are intimate with light and darkness, brilliant life and easeful death, and create a home in “the stillness / of rooms after the light has left / and shadows have settled / the same inside as out.”

–STEPHAN DELBOS, Poet Laureate of Plymouth MA. and author of Small Talk