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Commentary on Stone Sky Lifting
Book Jacket Blurbs
In the form of an almost overwhelming sense of being most fully alive, a graceful and penetrating energy abounds in the poems collected in
Stone Sky Lifting. Lia Purpura’s poems tread on that thin line between talk and song, an artistic gesture that wants to elevate talk to the level of song and bring song down to the level of good talk.
In this careful balance of seemingly disparate ideas about poetry, the poet has found a form that is at once faithful to the music inherent in
our language, and at the same time resonant with the poet’s skilled attention to the musical possibilities of the line.
Lia Purpura’s is also the poetry of rich and engaging metaphor; and it’s metaphor in the old way:
metaphor that illuminates a world just under the surface of our world, and that allows the writer and gratefully, her reader, the opportunity to live more fully and more imaginatively.
--Bruce Weigl
In Lia Purpura’s powerful new collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, we are offered a vivid and constant flux of resemblances, those special convergences and transformations of the “things” and beings of our – the natural—world.
Lia Purpura’s poems are remarkable for their capacity to pay attention to the minute inscription of a life’s passage as they are being made all around us.
Often, the poems make us feel as if we can hear those secret fables being whispered at just the other side of dream.
With the delicate discretion of her imagination, Lia Purpura reminds us of our kinship to all things, and of the vital place of human consciousness in the shifting kaleidoscope of worldly change.
--David St. John
Lia Purpura is a poet for whom the great human obligation is to struggle to see this world with clarity – as it’s never been seen before.
Purpura is a “nature poet,” but few poets do not fit that category. This poet discovers ways of learning more about the nature of the inner world from observing the outer, and at the same time she reads the outer from the inner.
--David Citino
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