Our Ghosts Wait Patiently by Kathleen Goldblatt

Reading Our Ghosts Wait Patiently is like opening a box of gorgeously decorated painted eggs. I loved holding up and turning, one by one, these vivid, lapidary poems. The book’s ghosts—grandparents, great uncles and aunts, parents, the old country and those who are buried and still living there—emerge in their tender, enduring humanness under the poet-speaker’s compassionate and clear-eyed gaze. As a collection, Our Ghosts is notable for its mature, generous restraint; this is a work not of haunting, but of resonance. Perhaps most remarkable is Kathleen Goldblatt’s ability to accompany in the poems a child’s vivid observations with a keenly perceptive intuition that must remain wordless, but, is nevertheless lyrically conveyed.

–Erin Redfern, author of Spellbreaking and Other Life Skills

“The dank sweetness of potatoes in one bushel/ apples in another// words have little power here” Kathleen Goldblatt writes, recalling her grandparent’s basement kitchen in Our Ghosts Wait Patiently. The book honors the deeply lived, but often unexpressed, longings, disappointments, griefs, and loves of past generations. From scratching eggs as a child with her Czech grandmother and tending the garden with her grandfather to visiting her grandmother’s grave and processing her parent’s aging and death, the speaker in these poems gives voice to what has been voiceless. With tight lines and vivid images, these tender poems sing, and by the book’s end, its ghosts have almost become our own, beloved figures who revisit us.”

–Nadia Colburn,  Ph.D., RYT200, Writer. Teacher. Coach. Yogi. Activist. Author of The High Shelf

A haunting invocation of the spirits that power memory and desire. The poems of this deeply probing debut volume pay luminous tribute to women’s soulful influence through time. With an ear for unspoken ruptures and an eye for arresting detail, Kathleen Goldblatt captures still-life moments of early experience and holds them up like found objects that glimmer through the prism of time. Her careful excavation of meaning includes cracking painted eggs under the watchful gaze of her grandmother and the dreamt memory garden of the poet’s own incantatory prayer to her Ur-maternal muse.

We are all moved by the ghosts we carry with us; they inhabit us, and the pain of their unanswered questions becomes our own.  Kathleen’s strikingly visual verses bring those figures out of the shadows into sharp relief and her words coax them to transcend life’s barrier of language and to speak with an intimate and commanding grace.

–Angela von der Lippe, Ph.D., has edited and translated the first English edition of Lou Andreas-Salome’s memoir of Rilke, You Alone Are Real To Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke and is author of the historical novel, The Truth About Lou.