It’s a pleasure to read Roberta Gould’s “Pacing the Wind” with the bright precision we expect from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. In her book “Three Windows” we have vital poems that strike chords as in To the Dogs where the poems succeed and go deep. Scads of new readers to Roberta Gould!

     X.J. Kennedy

 

Gould starts the reader off in the territory of the ordinary before turning a corner into realms of the strange and sublime. Holding forth in a voice marked by brevity ad surety she offers poems short  on the page but long in perspective: lenses that reflect worlds we thought we knew”

    Margot Farrington,  American Book Review

 

These are keen witty poems of observation, wisdom and savvy.  I enjoy the whimsy, the amazing range and variety and, most of all, the brevity and completeness where she sifts our whole civilization in a mere stanza and gets it right.

    Kate Millett, on Gould’s In Houses with Ladders

 

The tension between the lyrical and the practical, the soaring and the quotidian give her poetry its arresting and archetypical energy. A procession of gongs and silences, powerful and affecting.  A poet to the bone.

    Stanley Nelson, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award

 

This fine collection does not stand on any lofty height. The poet asks the passerby just to consider. Her hands are not mere channels for writing but dousing rods of inspiration. Gould sorts through the sensual debris of life and weaves ephemeral bolts and veins..the storms that are evident internally.

    Robert Milby, Poet Laureate, Orange County, N.Y.  2017-2019

 

Roberta Gould is the author of eleven books of poetry. Among these are Writing Air, Written Water, Pacing the Wind, Only Rock, Louder Than Seeds, and her latest released in 2016, To The Dogs and an e-book What History Trammels (2011). She taught Romance languages at Brooklyn College for twenty years and briefly at the University of California in Berkeley.

 

Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Now, Catholic Worker, California Quarterly, Milkweed Chronicle, MidAmerican Review, Jewish Currents, Green Mountain Review, Confrontation, Helicon Nine, Socialism and Democracy to name a few, and in anthologies including: The Art and Craft of Poetry, A Slant of Light, Up the River, Rage Before Pardon. Gould was editor of Light : A Poetry Review.  She has read her work on public and university radio, Radio Universidad Guadalajara, WKCR, Columbia University, WNYC, Pacifica Radio, at the Pen American Center, the Woodstock Poetry Festival and has exhibited her surreal photography in New York City . She is translator of poetry by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Salvador Espriu, Pedro Garfias, Jorge Luis Borges and other Spanish language poets.

 

An active member of the Haitian People’s Support Project and many humanitarian organizations supporting the poor, and the oppressed, she lives near the Ashokan Reservoir in the Hudson Valley, New York, spending time with classical music and  birds.

 

robertagould.net