| BOOK
REVIEWS
Elizabeth
Kirschner’s “Twenty Colors” is a first
book quite remarkable for its consistency and maturity of
voice. The beautiful contradictions are conveyed with much
poise, confidence, and courage as the poet maintains a stance
that is once tough and tender, mediating between a gentle
embracing of disappointment and mistrust toward any promise
of paradise.
Nance
Van Winckel, Shenandoah
“In
her debut collection, “Twenty Colors,” Elizabeth
Kirschner offers a splendid chronicle of exiles and reprieves,
a chronicle in which vision operates at the extremes of
materiality, upon the flesh of everything.
Donald
Revel, Denver Quarterly
What
fascinates about “Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees
is its overt delineation, through the medium of lyric poetry,
of a distinct, linear narration. What makes this book a
success is how Kirschner tells Lily’s story; the poems
are powerful; and moving, with the plot not so much narrated
as evoked. The real treasure is the wonderful last section,
where Lily must come to terms with both her past and her
present…all the poems work to create a Lilly who becomes
real in our eyes and then transcends that reality, becoming,
in the victory of her past, a moving symbol of human possibility
in the face of any odds.
Bern
Mulvey, The Missouri Review
Praise
for the forthcoming book, “My Life as a Doll.”
These
poems are dark, iridescent beads strung along a narrative
of embattled childhood that supports but never overrides
the lyrical force of Kirschner’s voice and vision.
The narrative begins with a mother’s violence and
follows it effects upon the daughter’s inner landscape—the
visions, the bouts of madness, the circling smoke of memory—as
she grows older. It’s the landscape that generates
the force behind these poems, rendered as is with stunning
imagery at every turn and with urgent rhythms that push
toward a kind of exorcism. These poems confront hard things
head-on, but far from being sensationalistic or depressing,
they are lush, fierce, and lovely.
Leslie Ulmann
The
bleak ferocity of Kirschner’s lines often to comes
nigh to overwhelming this narrative of an abused childhood
but the strength of imagery, a richness for which this poet
is known, seizes the nightmares and transforms them into
events that can be handled, shaped and put aside. No, not
a happy ending but one that locates dignity and the forever
force of life.
Hilary
Masters
Reviews
of “The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons
…Several
of the poems closely follow Heine, but the emphasis of the
cycle is fundamentally altered—the love affair is
made to last longer, through four seasons rather than just
one, and the heat is turned down to a slow burn that is
perhaps more appealing for the modern listener than Heine’s
lyrics of infatuation. The listener is directed to Kirschner’s
cool but devastating final exit for the poet. It is perhaps
Kirschner’s blank verse that is most compelling—“In
vesper shadows, I can behold your silouette in violets”—and
it fits Schumann’s music.
Sam
Goody
I
love the folks at little Albany Records. I love them. You
never know what they’ll come up with next, but you
do know it will be passionate. Here is a collection of music
by both Schumanns—three famous songs and a handful
of piano Romanzes by both Robert and Clare. The comes the
“Dictherliebe,” Schumann’s ethereal cycle
about the course of a love affair—fitted with new
poetry, not a tranlation. “In wundershoen Monat Mai,”
though it translates “In the beautiful month of May,”
begins instead “I saw the lilacs in the rain.”
I liked the experiment. You coud argue that the German contributes
to the nature of the songs, but still, the newness of this
creation puts the music in a new and interesting light.
Mary
Kunz Goldman
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