July 2009

Prisoner of the Swifts

Published by Ahadada Books

The vivid imagistic precision of Judith Skillman's "Prisoner of the Swifts" encompasses the full emotive spectrum--"the quotient / of happiness / divided by storehouses of dread"-- in poems that traverse the range of experience from pleasure in newborn life to "the great wealth of pain" from which that life emerges. Like Dickinson, another poet whose passionate imagination "overflowed / the room" to embrace the whole universe, Skillman watches the aerial acrobatics of never-alighting swifts beyond her "Victorian walls," and discovers in them the strength of spirit to confront her own frailty and to celebrate a life "that seeds and recedes." These poems "render in iridescence" the mortal lives, with their windows onto eternity, of us all.

Carolyne Wright