Some Help from the Dead

One critic said about Some Help From the Dead, "These are flawless poems, poems I like as much as any of W.S. Merwin's poems (at his best)." In this, her third collection, Ally Acker continues her fascination with how the familiar proves to be mysterious, how the present, past and future all to merge as our lives progress. As Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, the art of losing isnAEt hard to master. And so with her ear tuned to the ground, garnering wisdom from those who have passed, Acker listens for the lyrical cadences of nature on what is lost, and found again.The mundane becomes surreal (as in The Window, where "the photographs are where / the building once was: / Cows, mountains, streams. / But her landlord will do nothing...", and in her extraordinarily inventive interpretations of the paintings by the Surrealist, Remedios Varo), and the surreal transmutes into the quotidian. What arises is a miraculous resonance in the everyday, and a poetry that celebrates the living.

About the Author :
Ally Acker is a New York filmmaker, writer, and Buddhist. She is the director of eleven feature documentaries, an interactive CD-ROM hosted by Jodie Foster, and the author of Reel Women, as well as two books of poetry. She is the winner of the Laurel Entertainment Prize (for The Mathematical Mermaid), the Los Angeles Women in Film/Annenberg Scholarship for excellence in screenwriting, the Chester H. Jones Foundation Award, and the Carl Sandburg Centennial Contest. She also maintains www.reelwomen.com.

Review :
"Ally Acker, this fearless, shameless, generous, magnificent poet who marries herself to "wind, birds, breath," to women, to a dead father, to reality and surreal painting--in language sleek as a feather, magic as the moon--Ally who celebrates whatever love she can find, "whatever terrible price love exacts," and speaks in the voice of the goddess they've tried to silence -- Ally who assures us "now, the time has come/ Time for the new animals/ to be born" -- and yes, we are those animals, and Ally Acker is a prophetess." --Alicia Ostriker "Ally Acker writes with verve and passion--her poems wake up dull terrains of thinking and snap us back into vivid mind." --Naomi Shihab Nye "Ally Acker's latest is a beautiful book--by turns brazen, un-sappily Sapphic...Created with a compositional brilliance throughout...There's a fearless honesty that underlies Acker's writing...She evokes the dignity of the aloneness of loneliness with a natural ingenuity that is breathtaking." --Jack Hirschman