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As If a Song Could Save You
Betsy Sholl
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
“Attuned as she is to harmony—musical, spiritual, earthly—Sholl weaves seemingly miscellaneous notes into vibrant wholes. She references Dante more than once and it’s apt, for she is very much a pilgrim, someone who conveys the feeling of being in it—the tangle that is a moment, a street scene, a biblical incident—and that is a key to her achievement, her openness to the ways of being. Great compassion marks these poems, that inestimable talent for tracing the ways of kinship, how one occasion graces another.”
—Baron Wormser
Sounding out the melodiousness and meaning of life’s ups and downs
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,
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”
Praise
“Unflinching in their willingness to engage with matters of faith, personal loss, and empathic witness, these poems probe and speculate, articulating rather than resolving their uncertainties. They sweep jazz and religious thought into their ample net, are gracefully informed, never doctrinaire, and leave us lifted by their uniquely devotional spirit.”
—Leslie Ullman
“Keenly alert to a world where ‘the light that falls is knit with shadow,’ Betsy Sholl creates an encompassing vision of nature and spirit, past and present, self and others, music and word. Always ‘going griefward’ toward the gorgeous elegiac poems of the last section, she offers us difficult but sustaining wisdom. ‘Yes, it is hard, but there are gifts’—including these exquisite poems.”
—Martha Collins
“Pulses with the tension between irrepressible life force and inevitable loss. . . . Though this book is Sholl’s extended meditation on the loss of her husband, she hears music even in the trauma of her bereavement.”
—Portland Press Herald
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
1
There Is a Fountain
Big Box
Practice
The Daffodils
On Reading
Bear
Starlings
Morning’s Only Yellow
Thinking of Jonah at the Children’s Museum
The Recital
Hurdy Gurdy
The Birthday Party
2
Dear Sky
A rabbi, a minister and a priest walk into a bar
On a Line by Charles Wright
Ladders of Paradise
Once in an Antique Shop
Missing Person
A Showing of Acorns
Ugly Beauty
Bargains
Everest
Happy, Happy, Happy
Slow Night at the Piano Bar
Thomas Merton Experiments with Meditations on Jazz
3
The Cocoon
Reading Revelation
On Ladders, Mystical and Otherwise
After the Keynote Address, the Drive Home
Bedtime
Thin Places
Elegy with Bats
Transmigrations
Corcomroe Abbey
The Sparrow in the Banquet Hall
Galway
Whatever Alights
4
Knot
At the Dealership
1985
One Step
Advent and Lamentation
Without You
Widow, Walking
The Bridge
Talk Radio
Crossing: Casco Bay
To Vincent Van Gogh in Heaven
Rainy Street, Portland, Maine
The Caterpillar
Miserere Mei, Deus
His Shaving Cuts
Notes
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Larger images
November 2022
LC: 2022013231 PS
128 pp. 7 x 9
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