Brooklyn Beginnings: Poems by Carolyn Grassi

Brooklyn Beginnings is more than the world of Flatbush, Central Park, the Atlantic Ocean, and its many geographic mentions-it is an honest expression of a woman's life beautifully told-every poem is an interior meditation, as though a collaboration with the Divine, harvesting memory, ruminating, observing, recalling anecdotes, revealing a life of reverence. Each line we know to be true with a voice incapable of artifice. I don't know when I've read a work where every fragment radiates so wholesomely-with language so clear-by someone who says everything she thinks- and stories unchanged by time's imagination. This is why I believe Brooklyn Beginnings is a masterwork and a triumph. Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet LaureateEdgar Allan Poe once claimed that readers of literature are seeking a "heart revealed." Carolyn Grassi's memoirs in poetry shine because they not only reveal her heart but fascinating glimpses into her soul. Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and other booksThe evocative mixture of memory, dream, spirit, and beautifully observed nature reveals the trajectory of a sensitive soul, from childhood to maturity. Rich in image, these are poems to which the reader will return time and again. Deborah O'Grady, renowned Photographer & Videographer In these poems the writing is immersive and engaging, eliciting close reading to catch the voice-- a consistent, coherent voice recollecting and meditating upon lived experience. The theme I make out is Spinoza's deus sive natura, or Teilhard de Chardin: the divine manifesting itself in nature. At their finest, as in A Call To The Commons, the poems attain the sort of cosmic imagination or consciousness that we are so much in need of right now. A. David Moody, Professor emeritus University of York (UK), author of Ezra Pound: Poet. Portrait of the Man and His Work.