Songs from the Shaper’s Harp by Roberta Schultz

Roberta Schultz‘s Songs from the Shaper’s Harp is an exploration and a celebration of memory and the imagination, how we create and reveal poems, songs, dreams, stories, and the mysteries that permeate all of life. Color, motion, and sound infuse these poems with deep wonder and reverence for the natural world. They examine family and community connections, revealing ways to heal from the losses we inevitably experience as humans. Sea creatures, ghosts, angels, sirens, dreamers, singers, seers, and ancestors inhabit these poems, linked by the rhythm of words and voices layered with images of water, shape-shifting, and the borders between worlds. The “stories coiled inside” Songs from the Shaper’s Harp vibrate with emotional intensity. They “open a wide space,” as if they were “channeled into songs from the deep.”    

— Karen George, Swim Your Way Back

In Songs From The Shaper’s Harp, Roberta Schultz creates poems from the mythic and the ordinary, from the past through the present. The poems are always aware of mortality and change, of family memory and ancient ways. We encounter both the everyday and the magical in them. Each is a “deft vessel” which shapes life and lore into memorable and varied song.

–Richard Hague, Poet-in-Residence at Thomas More College, Author of During the Recent Extinctions, Dos Madres Press, 2012

Here, in Songs for the Shaper’s Harp, Roberta Schultz gives us both hymn and scripture from the religion–and mythology–of family. Blessings from kitchen to fishing hole to shoe store, this book of miracles is not an elegy, but rather a pulsing hymn, a host of singing parables. Like the small basket of endless fish and the bottomless vessel of wine that fed the multitudes, this book is filled beyond its walls with intimate sacraments.

–Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxy Wagon: Poems.