Reflections

What a remarkable, sweeping collection from writer Ute Carson! This inspired arrangement of poetry, conveys the richness and poignancy of every life stage. Drawing from remarkable experience and striking particulars, she ultimately conveys the light of gratitude—“the clearing you spy / beyond a forest thicket.” The poems are love songs to family and life itself, cyclical loss answered always by powerful renewal.

—Judith Austin Mills, author of Accidental Joy, a Streak of Poetry and the Texas Revolution Trilogy

Ute Carson’s poems are gifts she “lift[s] out one by one / and gingerly hold[s]them up / to the silver light of sunset.”  These poems are infused with the joys of grandparenting and the consolations that nature and memory offer while clear-eyed in their contemplation of aging and death. Standing in the tension between cherishing and letting go, her voice rings true in these poems as she says: “I know this is the life. / I would want no other.”

—Carol Denson, poet