Rough Cradle Poems by Betsy Sholl Alice James Books purchase this book from Alice James Books purchase this book from Amazon.com

Rough Cradle is a book that draws a reader in. The cover is appealing with its rich, dark tones, and the painting of the slightly dangerous sea viewed from a location which might be safe or one of complete isolation. This balance continues within the pages in the epigraph from Yehuda Amichai: And it is written in the book that we shall not fear. And it is also written, that we also shall change, Like the words, In future and in past, In the plural and in isolation. Sholl’s poems deliver, after this set up, a rich combination of language and mind meditating on personal and universal matters. These poems pay attention to the world, and with syntactically pleasing combinations present an observer able to render the observed world and the fragile human role one can play within it. Take the first sentence of the first poem, “The Sea Itself,” Here, on solid ground, a blue jay lands, beautiful and shrill, looking right at me, banging a seed over and over, as if he’ll never get it right—another creature I once crudely dismissed. Nearly every poem in this collection presents lines with these pleasing combinations. Sholl can craft real, recognizable, daily experience into a sonically beautiful poem. She works to make meaningful personal inquiries into the internal life while examining the world around her. The subjects of her poems are not what stand out, but the alive mind within the work feels like an old friend, or generous Aunt both providing advice on life and gently teasing the reader. The poems are often meditative, and serious but never laden with an overly somber presence. Lullaby in Blue      The child takes her first journey through the inner blue world of her mother’s body,      blue veins, blue eyes, frail petal lids.      Beyond that unborn brackish world so deep it will be felt forever as longing, a dream      of blue notes plucked from memory’s guitar,      The wind blows indigo shadows under streetlights, clouds crowd the moon and bear down on the limbs      of a blue spruce. The child’s head appears— Or take the opening to “Bird Watching” Maybe it’s not a lie to say my mother was once a bird, or two really: one who’d soar, blue into blue, the other a groundling endlessly pecking. Perhaps we get Betsy Sholl by way of Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon. Samuel Green said once somewhere, “Poetry’s job is not to just make us think, but to make us think beautifully.” Sholl’s poems exist themselves as beautiful objects and enter the reader through their imagery and sonic richness. They move by example and are a mind thinking beautifully and in turn grab the reader inviting them to do the same.

Betsy Sholl, a founding member of Alice James Books, is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently Late Psalm. Her awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Art Commission. In 2006 she was named Poet Laureate of Maine. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.