The Glass Tree

Poetry. "Laura Davies Foley's THE GLASS TREE is a meditation on history and loss—a husband's death, his history in Russia, and the speaker's own history with a beloved that leads her to eventually work with hospital patients and the homeless. Clear and compassionate, there is beauty to be found in the fragility and strength of THE GLASS TREE."—Denise Duhamel"What is the spirit of elegy? It begins in sorrow and lament, of course, but in these poems we see how elegy opens out to ever-widening circles of consciousness. We witness a pinpoint and unflinching attention to the endpoints of life: the fact of illness, hospital beds, and graveside bewilderment. We also watch these poems enact with dignity and beauty our capacity to absorb such pain. They show us how we sometimes barely survive our losses, but in so doing find ourselves more and more aware of the resilient presence of the soul. Or, to put the spirit of elegy in Laura Davies Foley's own words near the end of THE GLASS TREE: 'I sense clarity, / a mind learning to see itself.'"—Fred Marchant