Description
To My Dreamcatcher
by Elizabeth Robin
$19.99, Full-length, paper
978-1-64662-854-4
2022
A dreamcatcher watermark. A year haunted by ghosts. Encounters with strangers.
In To My Dreamcatcher Elizabeth Robin finds spirituality inside a work of art, the moon, a national park—places of reverence and mystery. Within such spaces, Robin tackles the challenge: as a woman alone, finishing life well.
We travel with her as she riffs on nature’s changing skies, landscapes, trees, lovers. Resolve deepens as she navigates her past in the title poem, “To My Dreamcatcher,” an elegy to her late husband. This journey reshapes perspective: she, like Andy Goldsworthy, leans into the wind.
Janet Kozachek (verified owner) –
To my Dreamcatcher is a complex tapestry of poetry for social justice, elegies of grief and loss, and visionary odes that coax the sublime out of the every day.
There are a number of ekphrastic poems which caught my attention – with a pleasant surprise that one of these was inspired by one of my mosaic assemblage works. There is an irreverent irony in Fruitless Struggle, which addresses Rene Magritte’s La Grande Guerre from the perspective of a disgruntled sitter for a portrait – her face obscured by an apple. In her poem Sisyphus and Icarus Elizabeth Robin positions herself securely in the pantheon of writers such as Auden and Williams in also having a final word on Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:
“ The lesson, clear as fresh ice skimming that bay: choose honest labor of skating loose,
as opposing bookends
the story in between remains: we live
and die between the bark and the wood.”
There is a pleasing tactile quality in much of the poetry in this volume – the joy of flannel sheets and the observation that the most sensuous part of Michelangelo’s David is David’s hand. Other poems, such as Inside the Moon, simply howl, giving the reader a sense of being there at an ancient campfire to bear witness to a cathartic song:
“It only hurts when we hope
and then, only if we love”