Empty Gate

Poetry. San Francisco poet Susan Thackrey's debut book of poetry, EMPTY GATE -- a long-awaited superb first book (Norma Cole) collects six sequences of poems in a work of singular endeavor, attention, and lyric intelligence. Ms.Thackrey, a member of the inaugaural class in poetics at New College of California when that program was created around the occasion of Robert Duncan's teaching, now works in San Francisco as a practicing analyst. EMPTY GATE is dedicated to Duncan, and opens with an epigraph from William of Aquitaine's Proven++al canzon: Farai un vers de dreyt nien (I'll make a verse of pure nothing) Out of negatives then, such silences (so what is it that holds its shape / shot full of holes maintains its hold / informs on us in time) the question becomes how to find a way, unfounded just here. EMPTY GATE joins Norma Cole's MARS and Duncan McNaughton's VALPARAISO as the third book in the Listening Chamber Poetry Series.