Ashland University MFA Program faculty and staff have had an active year with many new publications announced. Four new poetry books by AU faculty and staff have been published in 2012.
Morning, Winter Solstice
Deborah Fleming
"Winter solstice marks the annual moment of the earth's turn from loss and darkness and its slow, incrememntal re-dedication to light and life. Similarly the poems in Deborah Fleming's Morning, Winter Solstice acknowledge the often devastating impact man has had on the landscape while they crystallize those instances of nature's steadfast reclamation. The act of naming preserves and transforms; names of plants, birds, places encode whole histories and mythologies. In these poems of witness and warning, Deborah Fleming names with specificity that is itself an act of restoration and an affirmation of vitality and place." - Christine M. Gelineau
"Deborah Fleming's poems evoke through nuanced detail the disasters - familial, racial, colonial, ecological - that represent our pernicious heritage, and, simultaneously, the pioneering courage and the natural burgeoning that are equally our birthright. Despite the wreck we've made of things, Fleming reminds us that the earth restores itself and in its exquisite dailiness restores us to ourselves. The stain and the redemption: Deborah Fleming's poems bear clear-eyed witness to both." - Nathalie F. Anderson
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The Last Sacred Place in North America
Stephen Haven, Director
"Where Suburbans 'honk and veer' behind a neighbor's combine and Jesus walks into a bar to play pool with farmers, the poems of Sarah Wells study those juxtapositions of the urban and the rural, the wild and the agrarian which we live with in this country often without noticing. She notices and responds with the empathy of Theodore Roethke for the vulnerable non-human world and the visionary understanding of St. John of Patmos who knew a sign when he saw one. It is a pleasure to read a book of poetry dedicated to 'spirits reckless with praise and the need to be filled.'" - Mark Jarman
Deborah Fleming
"Winter solstice marks the annual moment of the earth's turn from loss and darkness and its slow, incrememntal re-dedication to light and life. Similarly the poems in Deborah Fleming's Morning, Winter Solstice acknowledge the often devastating impact man has had on the landscape while they crystallize those instances of nature's steadfast reclamation. The act of naming preserves and transforms; names of plants, birds, places encode whole histories and mythologies. In these poems of witness and warning, Deborah Fleming names with specificity that is itself an act of restoration and an affirmation of vitality and place." - Christine M. Gelineau
"Deborah Fleming's poems evoke through nuanced detail the disasters - familial, racial, colonial, ecological - that represent our pernicious heritage, and, simultaneously, the pioneering courage and the natural burgeoning that are equally our birthright. Despite the wreck we've made of things, Fleming reminds us that the earth restores itself and in its exquisite dailiness restores us to ourselves. The stain and the redemption: Deborah Fleming's poems bear clear-eyed witness to both." - Nathalie F. Anderson
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Stephen Haven, Director
T. R. Hummer says that "Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate humanistic ethos. Every word in this collection reflects concern: concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity's best hope. Global in vision, this worried book is unflinching, yet hopeful, yielding up a world in which 'Your own caesurae, / Your own circumference, / Is the shell of a missing animal. / You pull it tight around you like a cloak. . . . '"
"Stephen Haven's The Last Sacred Place in North America celebrates human experience as an ongoing act of translation: between silence and language, inner and outer space, child and adult, life and death, Beijing and Heartland. Like the forbearers he invokes - Ishmael and Henry Adams - the speaker of these poems embarks on an 'errand into the wilderness' only to find himself exploring the thickets within. Haven's poems movingly evoke our shared 'sheared experience' as they delineate the landscape of the human heart: our 'last sacred place.'" - Angie Estes
Miraculum
Ruth L. Schwartz
"Ruth L. Schwartz has reached a level of poetic maturity that we’re used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry… reaching after and trying to understand the natural world and her place therein, and modulating her poems with a subtle, ghostly music which has the capacity to lull us into understanding more about ourselves and about the wonderful ambiguities of living life most fully." – Bruce Weigl
"This numinous, deep-hearted collection explores the redemptive quality of love – and its ability to hold even the hardest facts of physical life, disability and death in its enormous arms. These are generous poems. They deliver that most amazing of gifts: a faith that can be trusted, because it is not blind." – Alison Luterman
Pruning Burning Bushes
Sarah M. Wells, Administrative Director
"Wells has been granted—and she knows it—the grace to eat life right down to the seed, where the joy of the mystery lies, and the peace that passes understanding. Deft and inventive with strict form, with ambitious narrative, and with the poignant perspective that, when called for, comes of becoming a small child, Wells equally thrives on the merest simplisms of faith, on the densest meditation, and above all on her experience of full humanity, turning all to stunningly cogent advantage." - Sydney Lea
"Where Suburbans 'honk and veer' behind a neighbor's combine and Jesus walks into a bar to play pool with farmers, the poems of Sarah Wells study those juxtapositions of the urban and the rural, the wild and the agrarian which we live with in this country often without noticing. She notices and responds with the empathy of Theodore Roethke for the vulnerable non-human world and the visionary understanding of St. John of Patmos who knew a sign when he saw one. It is a pleasure to read a book of poetry dedicated to 'spirits reckless with praise and the need to be filled.'" - Mark Jarman