INDIFFERENT LIGHT by Susan L. Pope

In her new book of poems Indifferent Light, Susan Pope shows us the world with “a poet’s fervor, a naturalist’s eye.” Her poems encompass a lifetime of love and loss, remembrance and silence. In one haunting poem, Pope references the bombing of Hiroshima, “blackened skin, flapping/on bone like laundry on a line.” This image carries through to another poem about an elderly woman’s meditation on hanging clothes, “for the flap of silk in the wind/for the white burn of sun on cotton.” Each poem is elegiac, spare and beautiful. This is a collection to spend time with, to savor.

–Robin Smith-Johnson, author of Dream of the Antique Dealer’sDaughter, and Gale Warnings (Finishing Line Press, 2015).

Susan Pope’s skills as story teller and artist suffuse Indifferent Light with vivid characters (oh, Ruth!) and lean images (oh! Iced pond as target).  Here is a pared world, suggestive as haiku, brushed by surrealism.  Modest in the infusion of her knowledge of history and art, her poems stir in this reader both admiration and curiosity.  As an ardent follower of Pope’s work for 35 years, it’s thrilling to have a new collection—28 walking meditations.

–Deirdre Callanan serves on the faculty of the New Directions Writing Program at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis