White Sea: Poems

White Sea is an elegant body of poetry that lingers on the tenuous connections between the living world and the hereafter, by award-winning poet Cleopatra Mathis. The varied free verse expresses emotion, human will in the face of endless entropy, respect for the sincerity of animals, and quiet contemplation of the serenity of death. An unforgettable and haunting collection. In Woods: Blind, I was nowhere inside, / drawn past the verge of woods / in the fallen night, blank / haze hanging / a hand over my eyes. / Blind night, no moon / white as a shout, a startled / shake to keep me / out of woods - no owl this time / sweeping before me. Fall's quiet / old now: the waving leaves, the fine / flying needles of the pines / dead and given to ground. / Every outline had filled in, / paid back its black / refusal, and I almost didn't see. / I was walking the silencing woods / when wilds woke, took hold / to turn me, something far and fast / lit the dark way back.

Mathis is a poet from Dartmouth, whose students I am constantly encountering in the NH Seacoast poetry scene. She is as superb a poet as she is a teacher. This volume grew from the loss of a close personal friend to cancer but it is not a whiny grief. It's the sort of grief that immediately establishes the the reader's camaraderie with the author as she examines the artifacts of a particular loss, from fury to helplessness and out. "Charmed by shine, / I've dragged a finger through the flame and stared into the sun. / Imagine, thinking that's where I'd see you." Fans of Mathis have been eager to read the sequal to What to Tip the Boatman? She does not dissappoint. Extraordinary.