In her new chapbook “Ode to Beautiful“, Sandra Sidman Larson, with startling insights and imagery, takes us on a journey to the “inner pearl surfaces” of our own lives. From Hawaii, Costa Rica and Mexico, to Minnesota, New Jersey and California, the ocean is a constant presence and metaphor: the liquid world against and within which these poems stake their claims. These are odes to “beautiful,” yes, and to love and that sheer ache we carry for the natural world, but they are also so much more: Larson is accomplished and intelligent enough to know she must place us–the flawed and lonely human animal–firmly within this beauty and that we must stand accountable. The best of these poems (and they are all so strong), whether they are dealing with death or not, have a quiet elegiac tone, reminding us of all we have lost and alerting us to what we still have to lose.
–Jude Nutter, “I Wish I Had A Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman“, University of Notre Dame Press
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Deep currents of grief and gratitude inform Sandra Sidman Larson‘s “Ode to Beautiful.” In ocean-side scenes from New Jersey to Hawaii, she underscores her concern for the fate of the waters of this world. The ordinary losses of time register alongside the threatening novel losses of climate change. Agilely seizing both the big picture and the small, defining detail, Larson lifts these poems above their griefs into the joy of art, giving the reader glimpses, in the words of one of her most exhilarating poems, of “an iridescent chain of being.”
–Thomas R. Smith, “The Glory“, Red Dragon Fly Press
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
This passionate and loving chapbook opens with the title poem “Ode to Beautiful” who is a “sliver of a fish” in a small tank, and then the book expands to celebrate beauty in the larger world as well as the threats to it–the oceans, the monk seal, the abolone. The poems here are happening by water, in water, and yet they are also happening within human bodies–bodies swimming, giving silvery birth, growing, growing older, dying. It takes skill to draw the reader into the sensuous love of the world and sound the alarm of danger at the same time. Sandra Sidman Larson pulls it off”.
–Roseann Lloyd, “The Boy Who Slept Under the Stars” Holy Cow Press
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
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