Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes – Poems

Description

Poetry. Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s COMPOSITIONS OF THE DEAD PLAYING FLUTES embraces the many joys of spirit and flesh| while acknowledging that death is an ever-present shadow. Her lyrics sometime sear| sometime soar| and are rooted in nature and her lived environment–arroyos| tundra| riparian forests–and further abroad in Haiti and Milan. These poems sing of the body both beauteous and bountiful| and contrapuntally lament trials of illness and surgery. The spirit of her lost son pervades her musings. Incantatory and mystical| she offers us “bells and charms/ that only girls can cast out like handfuls of sugar/ across any universe| / any threshold.” This collection richly rewards its reader. Its release is an event to celebrate.”Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s COMPOSITIONS OF THE DEAD PLAYING FLUTES is a book of stunning wakefulness. For it is a wake| but at the same time a celebration| one that focuses on places where the dead were once most alive| places where we are most acutely seen and heard. Here they are deserts| seascapes| landscapes with families. Like the bird wings that so often lift this stunning debut| Sorensen’s flight is full of gravity: ‘One day you are as light/ as a bird| and then/ you are not.’ We stay aloft by living| by insisting on the protean body of the world. Sorensen’s gift is elegy’s clear song| how it may conjure grace from serious illness| car crash| the loss of a child. ‘The universe bears no flatness. Even its horizon is curved toward repetition. Your death is a horizon. I run to slip over its edge.’ Yet we don’t| we stay. By honoring| each to each| our essential complexity| Sorensen reminds us love’s true service is survival.”–Matthew Cooperman “These poems are attentive| scrupulous| and transforming| as they range from the sensuous to the spiritual . . . Opened in body and spirit| the poet embraces her worlds| and she offers back this poetry| which shimmers in its urgent| delicate balance.” –Veronica Patterson”Barbara Ellen Sorensen is a lyric poet in the sense that any fabulist might be called lyric–a modern Ovid offering metamorphoses of the triumphs and ashes of human existence in a voice at once deeply personal and entirely of us all. Mystic| mythographer| trickster and elegiast| Sorensen engages subjects that would be ashes in the mouth of a lesser poet–relief work in Haiti| brain surgery| and most devastatingly| the death of a son–with Orphic transformation and the deep truth of stories we tell ourselves by the fire to keep ourselves alive. From the formal mastery of poems like ‘My Lithium| My Heart’ to the exquisite free verse of ‘Doubting Cremation’ (‘the beauty of a body/ torn twice from mine| because all mothers/ repeat the births of children who die’)| Sorensen gives us| in her Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes| the record of her epic travels| her trips to the underworld| and along with that| the words that will save us.”–Suzanne Paola