|
It's a lucky and wondrous gift
to us that Aliki Barnstone plays so much world on her finely tuned poetic
instrument. These poems scintillate with beauty, accuracy, and adventure.
—Andrei Codrescu
Blue Earth reads like a picaresque novel. The poems take us from the exotic
locals of Tibet and Greece to the more familiar landscapes of America.
It is a journey of precision and grace that transports the reader “into
some clear, unexpected blue place.”
—Cathy Smith Bowers
It’s both a delight and a pleasure in this vast American poetic
landscape to read a poet as breath-taking and luminous as Aliki Barnstone.
In this new book, Blue Earth, she gives us the best of herself, her voice,
and she writes as if possessed by the language of angels. The voice in
these gorgeous poems is mature, wise, and radiant in the way it strives
for the universal connections to place and hearth. I think clearly she
sets out to create a new type of landscape and journey in these poems,
and she accomplishes both in stanzas that are at once self-revelatory
and also elegant with rhythm and nuance. There’s a richness here
that is meant to be savored, like the best of life, over and over again.
Aliki Barnstone is a poet of worldly substance and great love. She’s
doing the work of sustenance that keeps many of us in love and well-nourished.
—Virgil Suárez
|