Light in Unopened Windows by Priscilla Turner Spada

Light in Unopened Windows dares to open windows of the past and asks the reader: Can memory retrieve and hold what is lost? In her deft hand and with an ear tuned to both formal poetry and free verse, Turner Spada recreates for the reader the ground upon which the poet was forged. For this reader, these poems not only hold what is lost, but distills it into language that is both moving and exquisite.

–Mimi White, author of a number of poetry books, the latest being, The World Disguised as This One, A Year in Tanka, 2015

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

“The title of Priscilla Turner Spada‘s lovely elegy for the father she never met, “What I Know,” might serve as a subtitle for this collection. What she knows of her father–a sailor killed in the war a month after she was born–is what she can piece together from things she finds in the attic: his pea-coat, his sailor’s pack, a photo album in a trunk. All the poems gathered here result form that kind of investigation, in which the imagination becomes an organ of perception, a sixth sense, no less (and no more) reliable than sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell. Turner Spada‘s imagination focuses on what is really there, looking behind picture frames to find the greasy marks on the wall “where boys with ducktails leaned their heads / while flirting with my sister;” and on what is really not-there. After her mother’s death she writes, “I’m in your space. / The air is dense / with emptiness.” The presence of the dead is felt so deeply that in poems like “Return to Cox Cove” and especially “Window Dressing,” one has the sense of a life not ended but transformed, gifted to the one left behind. This book extends that gift to the reader.”

–Alfred Nicol, whose latest books of poetry are Elegy of Everyone, 2009, and Animal Psalms, 2016

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

“These tender, genuine, deceptively simple poems are at once elegies and celebrations, expressions of grief over universal human losses, but also beautifully crafted verbal repositories in which what has been lost is lovingly preserved. In poem after poem Priscilla Turner Spada invites the reader to observe–to touch, if only with the imagination–objects so richly imbued with memory that simply naming them seems almost enough: letters, old photographs, clocks in an aging woman’s house, an old pea jacket from World War ll, flags waving over a military cemetery, an abandoned needle and thread, a cold teapot, a coffee cup with a faint trace of lipstick on the rim. And yet, the effect, which in other less restrained hands could have been wholly negative, is finally positive, a tribute to relationships that endure and outlive the absences they leave behind. These are poems that render us emotionally richer, and wiser, for the shared remembering of losses we all know.”

–Rhina P. Espaillat is the author of numerous books of poetry. Her latest publication is her translation of Robert Frost’s poems in an Spanish/English edition, 2015

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]