spuytenduyvil

Lauri Robertson’s poems are morsels to savor. She shares Proustian madeleines—hers, in a small crystal wine glass, just big enough for “a splash”, that takes her back to her father. You walk with her through her garden of fleurs sauvages, run your fingers over the stone crevices of the French medieval village walls, eavesdrop on her conversations, with her mother, maybe with you, with all of us, lucky enough to listen. These poems, and especially those on memory, are nothing short of the most profound philosophical meditations on living, loving, losing, and growing old.

     Nancy Sherman

 

Listen. Put your ear to the door and you will overhear whispers, laughter, prayers and protests, wry observations and revelations from a mind trained to listen and follow the twisting paths of words. Lauri Robertson’s poems in these companion volumes—In Concert and Where Do the Memories Go?—inscribe worlds. We turn the pages, encounter story after story. Every poem an image, a plot, mysterious and tangible. Loss, love, rage, solitude, self and memory, sentiment, the salve of creativity—our human lexicon—tendered by a feeling mind by turns wry, humorous, provoking, inflected with wisdom and curiosity—always honest. Nothing seems to come between Robertson and the page; she trusts it utterly and is wholly herself. Hers is a voice we want to hear.

     Anne Troutman

 

In Concert is a convocation of musings, both poignant and intelligent, laced with wry humor. We trace them along Ariadne’s threads of memory. The poems, conceived and received as ‘experiential’, are light of foot—serious and not, skeptical of literary pretension.  One might say that Robertson, as a psychoanalyst, is free associating, but these ruminations are deftly crafted. In the end, you will find in them a wise friend and, in her, an exceptional poet.

     David Barham