Quiet by Sandra Irwin

In her debut collection, Sandra Irwin paints the Southern California landscape from childhood to mature adulthood with its all its fecund lushness. Amid the treachery of the Santa Ana condition of wind and fire, Irwin enters a landscape of memory and metaphor as she searches out the exact depiction as a painter selects color, brushstroke, and tone. A poet of rare gift, Irwin’s delight in specificity leads back to truth, just under the surface.  While she may delight in gorging on apricots as a young girl and or dancing an Irish jig under a treeful of Amazon parrots, Irwin’s surgeon-sure mind knows “time unfolds / without punctuation.” In moving elegies for her daughter, including the title poem “Quiet,” Irwin dares to admit that “parts of me are now missing, / and what’s left has been rearranged” and that loss always leads to dissection of the heart, “content in the certainty / that truth existed / and could be found.”  The collection ends with a masterful sonnet sequence inspired by the Unicorn Tapestries of the Cluny Museum in Paris in which Irwin has the young unicorn behind the lady turn away, asking, “why focus on what you can’t / have?” From the opening line to the last, Sandra Irwin’s poems will delight and intrigue readers with their honesty and wisdom.

–Jeanie Thompson, author of The Seasons Bear Us