PRAISE FOR STONECHAT
Available from Bear Pond Books and Galaxy Bookshop
Stonechat is a remarkable book, fluent, fluid, formal, and fresh. Deeply connected to family and a New England landscape she knows intimately, Mary Elder Jacobsen carefully shapes each poem to its subject, the poems soaring with an easy, unforced lyricism, as in “Postcards from a Stack Tied Up with Twine,” a sonnet sequence addressed to her late father. When she writes, “I know the rare particulars of this vast and intimate brilliance— / the now of us—won’t ever, in our lifetime, come my way again,” we believe her. Over and over, these beautiful poems confirm the singularity of Jacobsen’s experience. —Elizabeth Spires, author of A Memory of the Future
In poem after poem, Mary Elder Jacobsen delights her reader with a vision, upended: the newborn’s bath becomes the dying father’s; the bees we keep keep us. “I have always loved the word reflection,” she admits, and her work does, beautifully, mirror, but it also sees in, with surprising, compassionate depths. Like water finding its basin (of course Jacobsen lives on a lake!), the poems form, as ode, villanelle, sonnet—each holding but not containing the perfect “punctuated surface that reflects the world she breathes.” —Jody Gladding, author of I entered without words
Jacobsen’s strong, clear poems make an accidental almanac for loving the passage of days. Many poems’ finely tuned music reenacts how “the bees, the bees, left us / amazed under plum trees.” Other poems have such indelible images they become a sheaf of “favorite Polaroid[s] . . . your face a flower tipping toward the sun.” Even as she deploys a variety of poetic forms with playful excellence—a crown of sonnets, ghazal, villanelle, ekphrastic—anyone could wander into this work and find a resonant sentiment. The collection as a whole encompasses (investigates and celebrates) Ceres’ vicinity—as Jacobsen invokes both the goddess of grain and the harvest by including a pasture’s worth of plants in her poems—among them: Queen Anne’s lace, sumac, hawthorn, goldenrod, even “fresh-shucked corn stacked nearly too high.” As well, Jacobsen pays homage to the actual statue atop the Vermont state capitol dome, a dozen miles from her dooryard, and the landscape basking between: a swath of dirt roads, forests, lakes, and cow pastures, and the family and friends she’s made within this lush geography. Across the volume, the poet’s sustained gaze at motherhood, daughterhood, a cherished husband and son, as well as a deep understanding of home allows readers “the rare particulars” of Jacobsen’s “intimate brilliance.” This full-hearted collection is the perfect book to steep in and to savor throughout season, but especially in the “long stretches of chill and dark and damp.” —Julia Shipley, author of The Academy of Hay
I hardly know where to begin—with Jacobsen’s studious and precise eye? her deft musicality? her formal inventiveness? with the way these poems enact deep love for family and the natural world? The poems in Mary Elder Jacobsen’s Stonechat rove between intimacies, seeing with an eye both human and mythic, their gaze cutting across a full life and a secluded patch of land that seems, at the same time, as big as the world. These poems sing and dig. I was sideswiped by “Sorting the Dark from the Light,” a poem about washing a mother’s “last night gown”—the way this poem treads into duality, building a waltz between the living and the dead, ending “We’re waltzing, not weeping. / Stop weeping, we’re waltzing.” —Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake
In poem after poem in Stonechat, Mary Elder Jacobsen maintains an Edenic wonder at the natural world with a verbal music that flows with internal rhymes, alliteration, and cascading lyrical lines. Charged with unslaked enthusiasm for her subjects, Elder Jacobsen sustains riveting attention to her immense particulars that add up to a poetic sum that is greater than the whole of her subjects and conceits by virtue of their verbal magic in which they continue to “sing” anew each time they’re read or heard. —Chard deNiord, former Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015–2019) and author of In My Unknowing
I have been a fan of Mary Elder Jacobsen’s incisive and precise poems for many years now. From the opening sequence of Stonechat, it’s evident that her debut collection is a culmination of countless hours of devotion to craft and love for the actual world. Jacobsen makes the everyday shimmer with life, so that a simple oyster becomes “the ark where life resides . . . tiny cradle, bearer of treasure.” Even Queen Anne’s lace, in her hands, becomes a “perennial herd” with “white-tufted tails” hiding in a meadow made sacred by this poet’s close attention, her immense command of language and form. —James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart
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A HANDFUL OF POEMS
“Dragonfly”: Four Way Review
“Slice of Morning”: One Art: A Journal of Poetry
“Sponge Bath”: storySouth Issue 49 Spring 2020
“This Be the Oyster”: First published in The Greensboro Review; selected for Poetry Daily
“Why I Still Write”: Paper Dragon
“Wiping Dust from the Atlas of Human Anatomy in the Used Bookshop”: The Decadent Review
AN ONLINE READING
Virtual Reading with Mary Elder Jacobsen and Raymond Hudson, hosted by Sundog Poetry, March 24, 2023
REVIEWS