Results by title
5 books match the query 'Sholl, Betsy'
As If a Song Could Save You
Betsy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Blue sky, yellow flowers, cool jazz, and Renaissance poetry all inhabit Betsy Sholl’s latest collection of poetry. Grounded in the everyday but never mundane, these poems remind readers of the wonders that surround us. From a child’s drawing tattooed onto the arm of a mechanic to bats under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Sholl points to the richness of life.
As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet’s world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain?
Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present.
The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page,
As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet’s world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain?
Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present.
The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page,
and it’s still hard for grown-ups to think you come
all the way down to the space between grass blades
—Excerpt from “Dear Sky”
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Don't Explain
Betsy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
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House of Sparrows
New and Selected PoemsBetsy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
The bluesy, rich, and vital poems in House of Sparrows look for grace and beauty not outside of the suffering world but within it. Betsy Sholl explores the shifting ironies and contradictions in the stories we tell—how the apple is both medicinal and poison, and how the poor are spiritually rich. Her language mines the landscapes of Appalachia, New England, and the works of Dante and St. Francis, seeking music and moral clarity in the breakages and noisy contradictions of life. By turns meditative and vivid, these poems suggest that all journeys are in part journeys of the spirit.
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Late Psalm
Betshy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Late Psalm takes themes from those ancient songs of joy and grief and transposes them into the language of contemporary life.
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Otherwise Unseeable
Betsy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Winner of the 2014 Four Lakes Poetry Prize
What if ruin is a good thing? What if each day is built on the ruin of the one before? What if all our attempts to avoid ruin only make us bitter or closed off from what’s around us? What if only by exploring our ruins do we become human?
The poems in Otherwise Unseeable examine such questions. It is a poetry full of music and surprise, in voices that are personal, invented, and historical, sometimes belonging to the poet and sometimes to others. Betsy Sholl probes what there is still to learn from the devastations of the twentieth century, and she explores the roots of human envy, greed, and generosity in lively, unexpected ways, enacting the kinds of arguments we have with ourselves: between control and relinquishment, grief and ecstasy, regret and acceptance, faith and skepticism. The end result is a book of verbal wrestling, a girl-Jacob mixing it up with one kind of angel or another, limping for sure, but still blessed.
Winner, Maine Literary Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance
The poems in Otherwise Unseeable examine such questions. It is a poetry full of music and surprise, in voices that are personal, invented, and historical, sometimes belonging to the poet and sometimes to others. Betsy Sholl probes what there is still to learn from the devastations of the twentieth century, and she explores the roots of human envy, greed, and generosity in lively, unexpected ways, enacting the kinds of arguments we have with ourselves: between control and relinquishment, grief and ecstasy, regret and acceptance, faith and skepticism. The end result is a book of verbal wrestling, a girl-Jacob mixing it up with one kind of angel or another, limping for sure, but still blessed.
Winner, Maine Literary Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance
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