Under the Quick (Free Verse Editions)

Poetry. In Molly Bendall's fourth book of poems, the verbal underworld of doing and undoing--oath, love charm, prayer, curse--becomes a refuge of tenderness and malediction. One of her generation's most subtly imaginative poets, Bendall overhears--and whispers to the reader--a lost language which is by turns brainy and promiscuous, clueless and inscrutable, bewitching and bereft: a voice skirting a strange silence, a "goblin market" of snares, cures, trifles, and m‚tiers inconnus. "In the gyroscope of the poetic mind, a wild imbalance is also a balance finely-tuned. Song reels in its strange ecstasy. Molly Bendall is such a singer, such a poet. Here is a poetry of charm in the deepest sense--where dark lore is the undercurrent to daily life, where beneath the poem's manners lurks a curious magic. Molly Bendall stands at the impact point of such collisions--right where the world grows complicated, right in the midst of its difficult magic--and lets the disorder complete its song"--Dan Beachy-Quick.