Not-Yet Elegies by Erin Covey-Smith

In Not-Yet Elegies, Erin Covey-Smith listens to a substantial silence. She asks vital questions: “How to live on a pinpoint?” “This human mark, what is this?” She converses with beautiful minds from Calvino to Whitman to Mallarme. She conjures an intricate hope formed across eternity’s lurch layered upon “the sonorous, deceptive pitch of a bird call.” And then, as is the function of the poet, she sets everything aside and asks more questions. We are lucky for her questions. We’re all listening for their answers. Covey-Smith gives us such elegant space to imagine these answers.

–Jefferson Navicky, author of The Paper Coast and The Book of Transparencies

Reading Not-yet Elegies, I “floated on a sheath over despair,” a line Covey-Smith quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  The sheath she creates for the ride backwards and forwards in time is deftly honed and delicate. You will want to take the ride.  She invites us into the imagination of the deep universe, of the child who has no need of hope, to a time before language.  She flashes us forward with images of the rusty world 6.8 billion of us have built and asks us oh so subtly to consider what that end will look like.  Throughout all this, Covey’s voice whispers, hums, beguiles.

–Kathleen Sullivan, editor, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis