Rough Cradle

"Betsy Sholl's Rough Cradleis a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision."-Nancy Eimers

Betsy Sholl's masterful, musical seventh collection focuses on human dichotomies: body and soul, mystery and knowledge, grief and ecstasy. Though the self is small in relation to death, love is enormous, and no life too small or mean to matter.

From "Edge of Town":

I would have

taken the whole wild western coast, wave-strewn

layers of sediment pressed down and heaved up,

left as rubble, then smoothed by the sea's

agitated prancing in its rocky stall.

It was that rough shore I wanted. And more.

Its long view back to something older than age.

Those two huge upright stones with a stone slab

capping them left to mark the dead

as if death itself were an old implacable god,

an ancient relentless one to stand before

dumbstruck.

Poet, critic, and founding member of Alice James Books, Betsy Shollis the author of six previous collections of poetry. Recipient of the AWP Prize for Poetry as well as a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is the current Poet Laureate of Maine and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA program.

"Solid, moving and thoughtful, this eighth collection from the Maine poet laureate follows the real lives of real people: stanzaic lyrics, most unrhymed and most in quiet American language, depict the poet, her son, her daughter, her friends, her ailing or deceased parents, her kind stepfather and the locales and vistas that enter their lives, from the Atlantic shoreline to the California coast. Careful poems depict air travel; a fine elegy, 'Twentieth Century Limited,' laments the heyday of rail travel while its tracklike couplets mourn a traveling father. Songbirds, migratory birds and bird-watching resonate throughout Sholl's pages: 'a bird/ flying off doesn't have to mean gone,/ it could mean: look at that bright going.' Sholl also listens to blues and jazz. A lively, long-lined poem imitates scat singing; another, in more typical language, questions the lost giants of Delta blues: 'You who were not recorded to be touched up/ and played back later, did you love the raw world more,/ love the shy songbird's refusal to be seen?' Sholl's lesser poems grow predictable or dated, with the same consoling epiphanies each time. At her best, though, Sholl (Late Psalm) represents patience, affection and generous attention to whoever she loves and to what she hears and sees." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Poetry. Betsy Sholl's masterful, musical seventh collection focuses on human dichotomies: body and soul, mystery and knowledge, grief and ecstasy. Though the self is small in relation to death, love is enormous, and no life too small or mean to matter. "Betsy Sholl's ROUGH CRADLE is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision"--Nancy Eimers.