Wild Silence

There is a pleasing formality and richness of detail in the poems of Elizabeth McCarthy's Wild Silence . Many of her best poems in this chapbook are memory poems, casting back to girlhood when she and her friends walked "barefoot into summer nights, /under a watchful moon, /[roaming] our small town roads"; or recalling her Irish predecessors who suffered the potato famine "there/in the green fields where Celtic gravestones/now stand crooked, moss and lichen covered"; or offering nostalgic meditations on her own and her ... Read More

There is a pleasing formality and richness of detail in the poems of Elizabeth McCarthy's Wild Silence . Many of her best poems in this chapbook are memory poems, casting back to girlhood when she and her friends walked "barefoot into summer nights, /under a watchful moon, /[roaming] our small town roads"; or recalling her Irish predecessors who suffered the potato famine "there/in the green fields where Celtic gravestones/now stand crooked, moss and lichen covered"; or offering nostalgic meditations on her own and her parents' generations - "the highwater marks... of our family's epic events." McCarthy also examines the natural world of Vermont, finding lessons and analogies in its flora and fauna - whether tracking the way blue morning glories open to the music of the day or watching how a heron stands "at the edge of water and marsh, /a poised reminder/of patience and time" - that might help humans navigate their own lives on earth. Whatever the subject, McCarthy's poems offer the delights of a sensuous imagistic imagination, accompanied by discursive, meditative appraisals, and a lyrical music that reinforces the emotional engagement with whatever she muses on. -Neil Shepard. Author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, The Book Failures (Madville Publishing 2024). Elizabeth R. McCarthy's Wild Silence offers the gift of looking -of sitting in meditative reflection on the natural world, our shared mortality, and the complicated beauty of domestic absence. These poems evoke peace, and, just underneath, a lovely twinge of grief-for the inevitability of time passing and what it leaves behind. In "Heron," the bird spurs a memory of the speaker as a young girl with her friends, "shivering in the shallows, marking our memories"-an image of loss and sweetness. Here and elsewhere, this collection is buoyed by a sense that while we are always engaged in the act of losing something, we are also always rebuilding, re-seeing. There is patience in these poems' precise observations, a willingness to deeply consider what is always all around us. I looked up from reading feeling ready to see what I often overlook. -Kerrin McCadden. Her most recent book is American Wake (Black Sparrow 2021.) Read Less