The Bells That Ring
$18.95
Many of Lisa Shatzky’s 45 poems in this collection are written in the second person. They address a “you” who might be the reader but who sometimes seems to be the poet talking about herself. This commingling joins reader and poet in a heightened shared experience. In other poems, we meet Shatzky in her first-person self, whom she knows to be two people, one calm, the other volcanic. This complex writer, in her seemingly simple language, shows us how to be aware of magic on a city street, how to struggle against conformity, how to maintain the desire to dance towards the deadline, and how to ring the bells as you go.
—Audrey Grescoe, editor of The Book of Love Letters: Canadian Kinship, Friendship,
This post is by the Black Moss Editorial Team. For more information about our team, go to About Us>Our Team on this site.
Reading a collection of Lisa Shatzky’s poems is dazzling... Lisa can take media stories from ‘over there’—the trophy- killing of a lion, suicide bombings in farway places—and move us into a closer and deeper connection. Throughout,
she invites us to share her perceptions, sometimes expressed in terms of listening (‘All you have to do | is listen to the sounds beyond the night’) and sometimes in seeing beneath the surface: ‘all things cover and hide and reveal | something deeper inside | if you wait long enough’. If you wait long enough: lisa gives us the patience to wait.
Susanna Braund, author of Seneca: Oedipu
