Still Life with Poppies: Elegies

Still Life with Poppies: Elegies by Leslie Schultz is what the name implies: bright joy against a sorrowful landscape. Death is everywhere in the world Schultz writes about-its relentlessness, its creativity, its suicidal call. Yet life in all of its various forms continues-some beautiful, some not. Cruelty may show its aftereffects for generations; a harsh set of comments may freeze creativity, at least for a time. While many may become cynical or depressed as a result, Schultz perseveres. Her poems about myth, in particular, are standouts. Schultz also understands in a profound way that the most emotional personal moments are mythical: emblemized by something as simple as plastic fruit in a blue bowl, or as iconic as a childhood home. For the depth of this understanding alone, you should read this book.
Kim Bridgford
Now, when so much contemporary poetry is mired in egocentricity, it is refreshing-and important-that in Leslie Schultz's work "the 'I' dissolves to discover the 'am.'" For her, "those luminous fields / surrounding hard facts, those currents / we move in" matter most. Schultz brings to her art the same mastery she has cultivated for decades as a student and teacher of yoga-the poise, concentration, strength, and balance required of yoga are translated into the words that give her poetry form. And one has to look twice to recall that the subtitle of this wonderful collection is Elegies. Her meditations confront the dark facts we all face, and the echoes of those facts strike the chords that give her work resonance, depth, and new shades of light.
Emilio DeGrazia
"Shiny, well-oiled, clean as a clock;" "dark and incandescent art;" "joy, indelible joy"-these lines from Leslie Schultz's luminous new book beautifully characterize its true mode and impact. Whether evoking such personal subjects as a brother's death, a divorce, the family romance; or the more public myths of Sleeping Beauty, Orpheus, or Pegasus, Schultz's poems move from lament to laughter and light, finding the dazzling in the diurnal, the miraculous in the mundane. Formally nimble (witness the terza rima, sonnet, villanelle, and sestina), and passionately intelligent, these elegies and celebrations embrace heartbreak and hilarity, providing, in response to silence and solitude, solace and song. Still Life with Poppies: Elegies is a book of marvels, a marvel of a book.
Ronald Wallace