With Jeannie E. Roberts’s On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Singwe encounter a poet who is absolutely of the earth. Her work, in the vein of Oliver or Berry, is part of the great tradition that illuminates the natural world in all its lush, technicolor wonder. What this collection does, too, is locate human experience within the same sphere, where our lives seem part of the same system as the woodchuck that’s run off toward his burrow back to the safety of his underground home,our actions equally animalistic. The poems in On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Singaggregate overabundance, parsing the sensory majesty that being alive can offer if we just open our eyes and ears. Lucky for us that Roberts records it all in this gorgeous collection.
—Sonia Greenfield, author of All Possible Histories and Letdown
Jeannie E. Roberts’s poetry reflects her exquisite sensitivity, as she finds beauty everywhere, even as the careless and wicked try to extinguish it. The natural world comes alive under her brilliant words, each poem a thicket or garden teeming with feathers and blooms. Roberts contemplates every detail of fin and feather in such a way that she becomes one with the flora and fauna, and invites us to follow her there. In this way, every poem is also a hymn to hope. Roberts also evokes the works of visual artists who see what she sees, which is so fitting, not just because she is also a painter, but because this poet is a true artist.
—Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review; author, The Rope Artist, The Neon Rosary
Just as “one piece at a time, can shape wholeness” so too can this collection. In these pages, the poet Jeannie E. Roberts, explores the vital themes of nature and survival, motherhood, ancestry, and the complexity of the bodies we inhabit. This book will take you to monarchs in the cornflowers, a forest lit with fireflies, griddles and skillets, and “a house painted in ocean swell blue.” There is an unfolding, which is transformative. We will come to know the “euphony of respiration” and the “buoyancy of geese.” These poems will bring you to a greater understanding of the life’s hidden music and the “revelry of an airborne leaf.”
—Connie Post, author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight
