Poetry. We need MAPPING THE SANDS--those of us who go to poetry for the expansion of spirit, as well as for music and the sensuous pleasures of language. The book is a record, not so much of making life one's own as of allowing it to emerge. Evoking the journey of a long life, Geraldine Zetzel's accomplished poems express a potent, often playful imagination that reaches through strictures of propriety and convention to the bedrock of connection--to what animals teach, what the senses insist on, what loss and grief make of us if we let them. These poems place us at the "edge of joy" and show us "how it comes and goes" the way a wave rushes up the shore; they live on that shifting borderline, a place where celebration and lamentation sometimes commingle, sometimes separate and define each other. This is mature work in a world where there is great thirst for it.

Author City: CAMBRIDGE, MA USA

Geraldine Zetzel grew up in New York, Switzerland, and Washington, D.C. and spent summers in Austria and Wyoming. Her career was in teaching, teacher training, and child advocacy. In addition to poetry, she is active at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement and with Cambridge at Home, an organization for seniors who choose to stay put as they age. The author of the full-length collection MAPPING THE SANDS (Mayapple Press, 2010) and two chapbooks, Near Enough to Hear the Words (Pudding House Publications, 1998) and With Both Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2004), she is a student of Buddhism and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.