ABOUT THIS BOOK

Judith Vollmer’s sixth collection explores human voices and geographies, stories and mysteries, and natural phenomena inside urban spaces. Her lyrical narratives, character portraits, locational investigations, and choral fragments often emerge from physical objects and from green and/or ruined cityscapes. Vollmer’s home city, Pittsburgh, and its sister-locations within Italy and Poland, undergird her attention to orientation and perception at work in her poems’ acutely visual studies.

Featuring twenty-one new and fifty-seven selected poems from her earlier volumes—The Apollonia Poems, The Water Books, Reactor, The Door Open to the Fire, and Level Green—The Sound Boat reveals Vollmer’s devotion to examining place and space to uncover poetry that touches emotions related to wandering physical and emotional realms: some familial and deeply personal, some unknowable.

Old city, I’ve come East for your long day and endless night:

down in the street, between the turtle fountain and the iron head

the party shouts and sings, sweats and snakes, swells into a throb

or momentum of sound.

—Excerpt from “The Sound Boat”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Judith Vollmer is the author of five previous collections, including The Apollonia Poems, which also won the Four Lakes Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poetry International, The Women’s Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh–Greensburg and teaches privately.

REVIEWS

“From the deeply moral and radical qualities of her first book to spectacular new poems, Vollmer has created a body of work singular in American poetry. With the sense, intellect, sound, tone, rhythm, and music only the most real and truest poetry provides, The Sound Boat embodies, on every level, the regions of the human soul.”—Lawrence Joseph

“Always at the center of Vollmer’s poems is her love and connection to the people she learned from: mothers, fathers, poets, artists, teachers, workers, literary ancestors, freedom fighters, and revolutionaries. You’ll find Thurgood Marshall in a poem with Rachel Carson; Rilke with Camus. No poet has captured more vividly that place that Pavese describes: the place that one ‘has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.’”—Toi Derricotte

“Beautifully cooked and served, full of harmonic oscillations, as transporting and philosophical as it is grounded and sensual. Vollmer is a poet in love with the world, real, imagined, terrestrial and atmospheric, and her poetry works in varied and magical ways. . . . The Sound Boat privileges its reader with poems that span decades, a body of work that startles and enchants with honest longing and love, all laid bare.”—Plume

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

New Poems

from The Apollonia Poems (2017)

from The Water Books (2012)

from Reactor (2004)

from

from The Door Open to the Fire (1997)

from Level Green (1990)

Notes