In the title poem of The Swing Girl, a Greek burial relic with an image of a small child on her swing suggests the ability to move between present culture and the ghosts of history, between modern metaphor and the rhetoric of myth. Katherine Soniat celebrates this fluidity and the detached yet vulnerable perception that comes with it: "The territory that girl could cover, her eyes peering birdlike / across the grove. The air, a vector."Soniat's new collection contemplates the present through the fragmented lens of history. She swings the reader out across time, to ancient Greece and China, and into the chaos of contemporary war in Serbia and Iraq. The ever-changing point of view disorients, so that ultimately even the daylight overhead seems uncertain: "... the far smear of daylight, granular and moony." Loss provides the substance of history and myth, sounding the dark, minor key of elegy for lives and geographies cracking under pressure.In Soniat's poems the precarious puzzle of this world shatters, only to begin again in startling new ways: "The story of the mountain always points somewhere / else, elusive as the tawny lion disappearing behind / the next high crag."

The Swing Girl: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Soniat, Katherine

Poetry

LSU Press

In her beguiling new collection, Bright Stranger, Katherine Soniat invites the reader to celebrate the unfinished and unsure. The poems in this volume do not demand or offer certainty, existing instead in the spaces between the real and the imagined, between past and present and future. They explore the human connection to nature, contemplating loss in the erosion of rock spires and rebirth in the blossoming of an amaranth. Visually playful lines recall the poems' existence in the physical world, even as Soniat's words transport the reader from the rugged isolation of the Grand Canyon, to the elements within the periodic table, and on to "the unwinding spool of grey" in the mythic underworld of Hades. Bright Stranger offers a soaring vision of the world in all its chaos, bewilderment, and joy.

Bright Stranger: Poems

With Polishing the Glass Storm, Katherine Soniat constructs a riveting sequence of verse that explores how archetype can expand both personal vision and narrative perspective as we hone our experiences into an understanding of shared commonality. In poems that weave a linguistic web between the metaphysical and material realms, Soniat reminds us of the many ways in which language can reinforce otherwise frail connections between vision and experience.

Polishing the Glass Storm: A Sequence

Alluvial (Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry)

UNKNO

There is a controlled, unpretentious constancy to Katherine Soniat's passionate, wise poetry that reminds one of the language of Elizabeth Bishop. Yet her voice is singular; there is an elegance of line, a centered quality that makes the poems more courtly than visceral. One tends to trust what is given in these beautifully rendered images and this gentle music. The poems are particularly crafted, partly meditative, yet the poet handles larger themes easily and with grace, without the shrillness that sometimes seems common in our time. Her gift for metaphoric language is evident. She has an even-tempered, deeply intelligent mode which carries from poem to poem.

A Shared Life (Iowa Poetry Prize)

University Of Iowa Press

Winter Toys

Reference

Greentower Pr

Fates: The Medea Notebooks; Starfish Wash-up; and overflow of an unknown self

Spitzer, D. M.

Pedone, Ann

Parenting & Relationships

Etruscan Press

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Books by Soniat, Katherine