northSightPraise for Lois Roma-Deeley's northSight: I remember as a child, watching my great-grandmother make a passage from the sofa to a chair. It was a hard landing. Yet, she composed herself and smiled. I looked around me and knew that only I had recognized a real heroism. After this, firemen did not impress me. I’d forgotten all this until reading tonight these new, brilliant poems by Lois Roma-Deeley. These poems are tough, brave, but also hold an almost physical balance against human suffering. --Norman Dubie northSight is above all a book of lives. Of the poet's own life, but not only that. Of women's lives, but not only that. Of human lives, but not only that. Time and history, the transcendental, even a bead of sweat are given their voice in Lois Roma-Deeley's vital chorus, whose song is of hard-won resurrection and the unlikely survival of hope. --Jane Hirshfield --from Lewis Turco, The Hollins Critic, (Dec. 2006) …And then she follows that book up two years later with another terrific collection, northSight....She is able to pull a reader into her world by the nape of the neck and make him live there until she's done. Then, when you’re through reading, you want to thank her for the abduction. --from Peter Huggins, Phi Kappa Phi Forum (Summer 2006) Arranged in four sections, northSight, Lois Roma-Deeley’s second book of poems, presents a cast of characters worthy of Dante: dealers, bikers, prostitutes, rapists, and tattoo girls on one hand, and war heroes, waitresses, monks, laborers, firemen, and immigrants on the other....Most important of all is this poet’s ability to mend the broken things, herself included... --From Midwest Book Review northSight showcases the ultimately hopeful poetry of Lois Roma-Deeley who draws upon the imagery of war heroes and tattoo girls, day laborers and monks, rapists and prostitutes, Italian immigrants and waitresses, bikers and firemen, the uncommitted, the confused, and the slightly insane, to craft memory haunting verse of a dangerous and sometimes mystical world. War Widow: "She's crying. All night she prays God give me a sign./Is he alive? Somewhere on a desert island?/Eating coconuts? Drinking palm wine?/ She touches her stomach. Eight months ago/they were dancing in Kansas,/the USO banner sagging underneath the heat/of their kisses. The trumpets playing: Begin the Beguine." --From Barbara Crooker, The Pedestal Magazine These are indeed words for our time, words to travel by. Throw away the charts, the road maps. Things are growing dark, and we can no longer count on faith, or the stars, to guide us. Still, there is hope at the end of the road. Yes, there is suffering, but these are survivors, and just as the monk in “This" “sees the blood on the stone / floor, a star burst he can copy, / something he can use" so does Lois Roma-Deeley, who takes these stories into her body, and makes art out of them. |
|
