Like Silencing the Wind by Pearl Karrer

War pervades Pearl Karrer’s Like Silencing the Wind, passed down through family, a WWI nurse bearing the loss of her fiancé, a boy missing his older brother serving in WWII, children playing war games, a one-legged vet. Even the landscape contains memories of what happened there: trees slashed, waterfalls reminding the speaker of the beginnings of war in Croatia. Thoughts of war interrupt the enjoyment of berry picking, an autumn evening walk. Yet the poetry’s sensory language posits a way to survive the inevitable hurt. It insists that though we are all affected by what happens on the other side of the world we can bear some of the weight of it together.

–Stephanie Bloom Pressman

In Like Silencing the Wind, Pearl Karrer takes her inspiration from marvelously varied sources, offering images of natural wonder from the Plitviĉka waterfalls in Croatia to twin apricot moons rising over a Mayan landscape, each scene brimming with vivid details that bring even the inanimate to life. Karrer spins tales from family photographs in rural Montana, wartime memories of a farmhouse in Croatia, intimations of self in a Rodin sculpture, heart-rending scenes from Afghanistan, Syria, and Boston, ending with the story of a Bengali woman who crossed boundaries and worlds, like wind, with a voice that can’t be silenced. Here are reflections, echoes, reverberations across continents and millennia, each a mirror in which we see our humanity, its violence and tragedy, hope and creative resilience.

–Terry Ehret