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 Heat LighteningA review of Heat Lightening in the Midwest Quarterlyby Bonny Barry Sanders
A note on the reviewer: Bonny Barry Sanders' first collection of poems, "Touching Shadows" was
published by Val Verde Press. Her historical novel, "Kiss Me Good-bye, is forthcoming from Burd Street Press, a subsidiary of White Mane Publishing Company. Her poems, literary essays, and book reviews have appeared in journals and magazines throughout the country. See her website: www.Bonnybarrysanders.com Opalescence "In
Opalescence, Judith Skillman blends the two arts of poetry writing and
stained-glass making into a powerful and highly original book. As the
stained glass artisan, for her art, endures the injuries that heat and
the cutting edges of glass and metal can inflict, so Skillman endures
the pain of exploring the obscure recesses of her personal past within
a web of historical, mythical, and biblical allusions that weave
through the book holding it together as the web of lead cames weaves
through and holds together a piece of stained glass. In these poems,
she shores the fragments of memory and emotion against the sure
oblivion of the future, just as the stained glass artisan assembles a
luminous mosaic from an apparent chaos of glass shards. In Opalescence,
Skillman lets us see through her to ourselves, not as through a glass
darkly, but with glorious light."--Stephen Meats, The Midwest Quarterly
"In Opalescence, Judith Skillman brings the light that shimmers through stained glass to poetry of the human and natural world. The poems in this book are themselves like marvels of stained glass in their nuances of color, the juxtapositions of feeling and image into all their potentials, in how each poem reflects, refracts, and enhances the others."--Joan Swift "Skillman's poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also mythologies and similarities...Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together by qualities similar and different."--Small Press Book Review A review of Opalescence in the Pebble Lake Review LatticeworkA seam ripper, scissors and needles, June 27, 2004 A
seam ripper, scissors and needles are not the usual writing tools for
poetry. These pointed instruments appear in this collection of poems to
sculpt poetry that is tough and tender, ripping fragments from
household tasks of repair and creation written with a personal
knowledge of working from home. These fragments from daily life equal
the poetry of surprise.
Latticework is written in a collaboration with artist, Erika Carter of WA, a visual poet/quiltmaker who uses fabric and textile processes as her medium. Judith Skillman, who has previously published other poems, won awards and fellowships, takes this collaborative opportunity to visit themes of transformation. In particular, the poem "House of Moon" evolves like a color field painting, a nightscape which lulls you with colors and images, then suddenly dissolves into an unexpected visual revelation. It could be a scene from film noire about loss and change. My first reading of this collection was continuous, much like reading a novel. Days passed and I found myself thinking about the power of a phrase with an image such as "snow is never easy to wear...just another way of aging". Many of Skillman's poems come close to my experience as an artist who works within and from family life trying to find poetry not only in words but also in fabric and paint, scissors and thread. Latticework is a lovely collection of visual and contemplative writing which needs to be kept at hand- to underline, to savor, to read patiently as meanings change with the reader's circumstance. The collaboration between the two artists worked. Now I wait for Ms. Skillman's next solo journey in print. It is possible that tools of transformation for cloth are equally valuable to rip and cut words into something fresh and new.
Joan Schulze Circe's IslandTHE SMALL PRESS BOOK REVIEW, June 2003
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Skillman's
poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to
embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also
mythologies and similarities. "Bearing the universal/forward in each
particular...," she writes in "Cardoon." She is not seeking anything in
this movement--neither knowledge nor possession nor control. The
movement is not an urge, but rather the natural penchant to connect
with what is beyond the immediate self. Things within the broader world
are connected by a tissue of shared qualities. "Increments of blue and
pink chalk/can be made..."-- from "On Circe's Island". Or, as she
writes in "Zaydee," "...pink fragments claim/the edge of a wave...."
Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed
quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is
spun together by qualities similar and different.
Poetry
explodes our old habits of experience to make the world (and thus
ourselves) new again. Some poems take us apart while putting us back
together, enfolding our perceptions in the act of smashing them, and
this is one of literature's great mitigations--the work of art that can
possess its own chaos tells us we, too, may be able to hold ourselves
steady. Look for no such mitigations in Storm, Skillman's new
collection of poems. Her work tugs us into the maelstrom of being alive
and strands us there, dust devils and curses blowing by, the ground
buckling under our feet. Attention twitches, like tic douloureux, from
Styrofoam replicas of molecules to memories of palsied Uncle Jake in
the kitchen where the dog humped your red-faced mother's shin. A
schoolgirl's briefcase holds "the stink/of instruments and limbs";
vision darkens in the "sackcloth of winter"; somewhere "between sewer
and hedge" a turtle stalls. The nervous system is a scraped and shaken
web on which moments crazily stitch themselves while "the earth
gallop[s] closer."
Forty-five
poems from the author whose first collection, Worship of the Visible
Spectrum, won the King County Arts Commission's Book Award in 1988. The
poems celebrate the author's return to playing the violin after a lapse
of nine years. Images drawn from music and ornithology dominate in
these finely crafted poems. The book is beautifully produced with a
cover painting of wisteria in sumi on rice paper. If sumi is the common
medium of painter and writer, these poems are the common medium of
violinist and poet."