About the Book
Initially, the poems in Subhaga Crystal Bacon's in this collection show her keen eye for delivering the natural world. It's tempting to think of her as a naturalist, but as her book progresses it becomes clear that, more broadly, she's a human nature poet; poems of love and loss and community occur with the same acute precision. For example, in "Awake at Night" (one of her complicated love poems) she begins this way, "I feel beautiful, young and dying / as the cricket song lifts and calls / and you are far away. No happiness / like this. The maples launch /their spinning seeds, such joy / in the deep air..." All in all, a wonderful collection.
Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pagan Virtues
About the Author :
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a 1995 graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers with a degree in Poetry. Her first book, Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, won the 2003 BOA Editions New Poetry America Prize. Since that time, her work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals. A dramatic shift in consciousness in 2011 brought her into seamless contact with awareness and perception such that she stopped writing for a period of years. Moving to the Methow Valley in 2014 and joining the Confluence Poets reinvigorated her creative process, resulting in many of the poems in this manuscript. She is a teacher in the Trillium Awakening spiritual path and lives and creates in the spacious North Cascade Mountains with her partner, Sugandhi Katharine Barnes.
Review :
Initially, the poems in this collection fine book show Subhaga Crystal Bacon's keen eye for delivering the natural world. It's tempting to think of her as a naturalist, but as her book progresses it becomes clear that, more broadly, she's a human nature poet; poems of love and loss and community occur with the same acute precision. For example, in "Awake at Night" (one of her complicated love poems) she begins this way, "I feel beautiful, young and dying / as the cricket song lifts and calls / and you are far away. No happiness / like this. The maples launch / their spinning seeds, such joy / in the deep air..." All in all, a wonderful collection. Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pagan Virtues
These poems show the love for one's vision of nature as the shifter of shapes. All of the landscape's Thingness--as Rilke saw it--ebbs and looms here, and Bacon follows their rhythmic changes. Bacon builds an album that honors the universe's traffic, the gaze melting to honey. In these poems, the economies of silence, well: The lotus has its foot in the mud. Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Futureless Languages
In these intimate, meticulous, compassionate poems, Bacon seamlessly marries the self with the world ... of wild rivers and dark trees, of coyotes and hawks, of snow and summer grasses--or the human body, with its love, its aging, and its griefs. ... With a deep mixture of curiosity and vulnerability ... Bacon sings of our human hungers--"diligent, defended, devout"--with wild consciousness. Kenneth Hart, author of Uh Oh Time
As I read Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Blue Hunger, I found myself putting the book down, looking off, and tasting the lushness of her words. I wondered, "Where was I? Sitting here / in the kitchen as the sky changes faces." The poems in Bacon's collection luxuriate in words, emotion, spirit, and landscape, in a "place of endlings." Grounded in the beloved Pacific Northwest, Blue Hunger is an account of a soul's journey, "empty of longing. / Luminous, lambent." In this world where grief merges with love, so does the poet merge "with that great distance." Each moment and season in a life is carefully observed, and Bacon's world abounds with raspberries, garlic, choke-cherry, jays, owl, deer, lizards: a "tunnel of loss." Her devotion to home and all its implications is laid out for us, a spine unfurling, the "heart exposed for the taking." Blue Hunger is a book--a place--I will revisit again and again because "What I remember most was the flavor of those words, scented with lost possibilities." Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella
