Synopses & Reviews
Pouring Small Fire is a debut poetry collection that intricately regenerates a full life experience spanning from the baseball diamonds, pond-mist and summer grass of Upstate New York to hot and sour soup and middle-aged love on Toronto's Spadina Street. Understandably, throughout this journey much is tragically and regretfully left behind, but Manchester's poems form a powerful, life-affirming argument convincing us that it's what is retained -- not only from the past but at this very moment -- that is enduringly important. Manchester possesses the uncanny ability to transport her readers to any specific time and place with her rich and precise memory and her refined command of the language. Hear the banter of the crowd, smell the hot-dog mustard, feel the mud in your fingernails, and "feel feather stroke feather, watch beak peck beak/ to know the instant when image is not image but real." A genuine poet of the senses, Manchester explores the heartache of personal loss as well as the small joys found throughout life--from childhood to marriage.
Review
"Emotions collide from all angles in Manchester's ocean of imagery. Anger, grief, lonliness, passion, and pain swirl together to produce 50 poems that paint pictures while exposing Manchester's deepest emotions . . . The personal and nature tableaus captured on the page buzz with their own intensity." -Quill and Quire Sample poems
Synopsis
"Susan Manchester, a sensualist of the ordinary, makes a bold debut with Pouring Small Fire." -Molly Peacock
About the Author
Susan Manchester has lived most of her life in central New York State, moving to Toronto in 1993. She has taught high school English for twenty-five years, and has also been an instructor at the State University of New York at Morrisville and Utica College of Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals including: The Georgia Review, The League of Canadian Poets Anthology, Tesseracts 8, The Antigonish Review and many others. U.S. poetry awards to her credit include the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the Daniel Varoujan Award and first place in Poetpourri's national summer poetry contest. She divides her time between teaching English at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in Toronto, acrylic painting, writing and singing.