Description
Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Dorset Prize. "Though we hear echoes of Stevie Smith, The Brothers Grimm, and Louise Gluck's wonderful severities in these poems, Rachel Flynn has made them wholly her own. ICE, MOUTH, SONG has a haunting beauty to it and an economy of phrasing consonant with its spare landscapes and mindscapes. Flynn will not pretty-up her world, nor will she be defeated by its harshness. In "On Wanting Only One Thing," her emblem seems to be the merganser, which 'plunges through cold water, small heart soaring,/ mind clenched behind hopeful, topaz eyes.' This is a poet who insists-in her excellent concluding poem-'I will not be sad in this world,' a refrain that we can't help but hear and feel as both a vow and a kind of hard-won triumph, barely eked out"-Stephen Dunn, Judge of the 2003 Dorset Prize.