Sheetstone

Blanshard's mystical book length poem, Sheetstone, is a woman's journey into a spiritual realm where narrative, language, and emotion are tender and fractured. The slopes of this epic poetry-memoir is a' magic whip' for passion, remembrance, healing songs of bitterness and witty irony. Love and death on the same bed, or powerful imagers of visceral pain and tenderness are put together with feeling and intelligence. Like 'the seed in the core" the poetry resides inside an ineffable heart and comes out in original, sensitive, beautiful tones and words. Romantic lyrics that surround the poet's travels through Asia to Europe, Oceania and finally Hanoi. Each is laced with the sights and sounds of these land masses, weaving the traces of clothing and architecture into the distance between the poet and her beloved. A significant love relationship is at once a rite of passage as well as a source of inspiration.