Sally
Keith
"Sally Keith's gift to us is an experience of the world rich and intensely
present to mind: simple because fully known, as if for the first time; and also
complex because profoundly analyzed, not by means of abstraction but by a visionary
intimacy with the texture and grain of feeling. This is poetry of a very high
order."
Allen Grossman, author
of The Sighted Singer and The
Philosopher's Window
"The poetry of Design arcs
between radiant acts of attention
wherein Keith displays a brilliant,
phenomenological turn of mind, as
well as a capacity to sustain a lyrical
interrogation of perception, faith,
form, the architecture of flight,
the fragility of matter. The vision
is fractal, the language painterly.
There is little of the contemporary
poetic vernacular here, but rather
a transcription of mind as is found
in the journals of Hopkins and Dickinson.
She is that interesting, and this
is an exemplary debut." - Carolyn
Forché, author of The Angel
of History and The Country
Between Us
From Design
Note:04 April
And farm machinery
on flatbed trucks. Not rural.
Not urban. Heaviness is—
what thinking thing is held
inside my skin? (What distance
is—) The dying
leaf dust catches in folds—
my hand. (Adamantine—
my prayer.) The flat
shell rendered still (what
beached life—) covers
the fractional
sand (asking—
oblique). And distance is—
that shallow thing (I
lift). Skip it. Then
watch each small splash
time marked in jumps—
how stitched-
I am—
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