Letter
from the Lawn, Poems by Bobbi Lurie
“The
separateness is so intense,” Bobbi Lurie writes in the title poem
of Letter from the Lawn. She
refers to the separateness of perception and the world, mediated
through words: “Without words rising up, I’d be stuck with
just these lawn chairs and the shrieking gardening machinery.” Luries’
letter from the lawn, her letter to the world, is a complex and engaging
journey to bridge the separateness.
Sample Poems by Bobbi Lurie
“Bobbi Lurie’s Letter from
the Lawn is a book of prayers, as well as a book of the child grown
large and adult, sometimes lost, but who is crushed awake by
beauty in a world of emotional volatility amidst the mist of leaves.
I love the way it veers through the quotidian and makes a dream of it
all, how things are not what they appear, how the erotic impulse drifts
in like weather to claim the speaker(s) of these poems, to hold them tightly
in the cool branches of the Godly world that stands brightly outside the
kitchen windows of a consciousness who has loved and known pain,
and who has found a kind of ecstasy in language that celebrates it all.
Neither totally narrative, nor post avant, the poems in Letter from
the Lawn are their own idiosyncratic things. They don’t need
classification. They are visceral and seamless and possess a breezy lyricism
that is at once startling and consoling.”—David Dodd Lee
“Like doors open ‘just a crack,’ the poems in Bobbi
Lurie’s Letter from the Lawn
reveal intimate slivers of lives—a man smelling a rose he long ago
planted, a woman stirring a man’s coffee, a pregnant woman alone
in an apartment. And while these glimpses, like Edward Hopper paintings,
often highlight our loneliness and the misery that is an inescapable ingredient
in ‘the deep brew’ of the human condition, they all also,
with great clarity, illuminate ‘the longing which bleeds/into/the
inner world.’ Painterly, nuanced, and direct, these are poems that
address the heart.”—Carol Moldaw
“Bobbi Lurie has a steady, unflinching gaze. In these startling
and moving new poems, where 'the dark / skies of evergreen fog of needles
and breath' press in on us, Bobbi Lurie has created a series of dark splendors
where, ultimately, no one is denied entrance to the wide circumference
of the world.”—Arthur Sze
Bobbi Lurie has worked as a visual artist and therapist. Her essays, short
stories, and poems have been widely published in the U.S. and England.
She lives in New Mexico with her family. CustomWords published her first
collection, The Book I Never Read,
in 2003.
ISBN: 1933456264, 96 pages, $17.00