As If a Song Could Save You: (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Blue sky, yellow flowers, cool jazz, and Renaissance poetry all inhabit Betsy Sholl’s latest collection of poetry. Grounded in the everyday but never mundane, these poems remind readers of the wonders that surround us. From a child’s drawing tattooed onto the arm of a mechanic to bats under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Sholl points to the richness of life. As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet’s world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain? Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present. The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page, and it’s still hard for grown-ups to think you come all the way down to the space between grass blades—Excerpt from “Dear Sky”

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments 1 There Is a Fountain Big Box Practice The Daffodils On Reading Bear Starlings Morning’s Only Yellow Thinking of Jonah at the Children’s Museum The Recital Hurdy Gurdy The Birthday Party 2 Dear Sky A rabbi, a minister and a priest walk into a bar On a Line by Charles Wright Ladders of Paradise Once in an Antique Shop Missing Person A Showing of Acorns Ugly Beauty Bargains Everest Happy, Happy, Happy Slow Night at the Piano Bar Thomas Merton Experiments with Meditations on Jazz 3 The Cocoon Reading Revelation On Ladders, Mystical and Otherwise After the Keynote Address, the Drive Home Bedtime Thin Places Elegy with Bats Transmigrations Corcomroe Abbey The Sparrow in the Banquet Hall Galway Whatever Alights 4 Knot At the Dealership 1985 One Step Advent and Lamentation Without You Widow, Walking The Bridge Talk Radio Crossing: Casco Bay To Vincent Van Gogh in Heaven Rainy Street, Portland, Maine The Caterpillar Miserere Mei, Deus His Shaving Cuts Notes

About the Author :
Betsy Sholl is the author of nine previous poetry collections, including House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems, Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle, Late Psalm, Don't Explain, and The Red Line. A former poet laureate of Maine, she teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Review :
"Keenly alert to a world where 'the light that falls is knit with shadow, ' Betsy Sholl creates an encompassing vision of nature and spirit, past and present, self and others, music and word. Always 'going griefward' toward the gorgeous elegiac poems of the last section, she offers us difficult but sustaining wisdom. 'Yes, it is hard, but there are gifts'--including these exquisite poems."--Martha Collins "Unflinching in their willingness to engage with matters of faith, personal loss, and empathic witness, these poems probe and speculate, articulating rather than resolving their uncertainties. They sweep jazz and religious thought into their ample net, are gracefully informed, never doctrinaire, and leave us lifted by their uniquely devotional spirit."--Leslie Ullman "Pulses with the tension between irrepressible life force and inevitable loss. . . . Though this book is Sholl's extended meditation on the loss of her husband, she hears music even in the trauma of her bereavement."--Portland Press Herald "Attuned as she is to harmony--musical, spiritual, earthly--Sholl weaves seemingly miscellaneous notes into vibrant wholes. She references Dante more than once and it's apt, for she is very much a pilgrim, someone who conveys the feeling of being in it--the tangle that is a moment, a street scene, a biblical incident--and that is a key to her achievement, her openness to the ways of being. Great compassion marks these poems, that inestimable talent for tracing the ways of kinship, how one occasion graces another."--Baron Wormser