Lie Down With Me:

New and Selected Poems

By Julie Suk

Autumn House Press, $24

BY RUTH MOOSE

Special to The Pilot

Julie Suk changed my life. Truly. Really.

So how does a poet do that?

Suk gave a workshop for the North Carolina Poetry Society at Weymouth a few years ago on writing the Sestina, all the briars on the trellis of doing and not doing.

I, who had heretofore run away from formal verse, listened, loved the Sestians Suk shared and explicated, came away thinking that's something I'd never do.

But the bug bit. Before I knew it I was writing Sestinas. Maybe not great ones, but digging deep in the form and finding it fun.

I was hooked and for the last five years or so have had Sestina fever. When not writing them, I seek them out in publications, and they are not easy to find. Editors, for some reason, look at Sestinas like poison ivy vines. They are wonderful to read aloud, lovely on the page, and exquisite in their own way.

In "Lie Down With Me," there are new Julie poems and selections from her four previously published collections.

What fun to trace through a writer's roots and find poems that link arms like the children's game Red Rover.

That's what a poet acting as editor/shaper of a collection must do. And Julie does.

Beautifully orchestrated and lovingly invited (Come over, come over.) At times the collection reads like a novel. Birth, loves, losses, deaths ... all life gives and takes back. We live on borrowed words!

Archeology lays a cornerstone for many poems, nature of course, family At times certain poems are capsule short stories ... anthropology, nothing abounding in this world (or above it) seems to escape this poet's pen. She travels: Italy, Greece, places not named in specifics, but the places the poet's mind backpacked into are endless as caverns. Illuminated. Beautiful and deep. I can' t pick enough of my favorites to quote.

I highlighted "Saving the Barn," "Late Afternoon," a family album poem "The Colors of Our Lives," "Each Day the Hand" (a pantoom! I bow to that), cried at the father poems, laughed at "Whoever They Call Mad" about "Miss Fanny, Miss Elise, Miss Aleta Jane who wear "the same crepe dress/frazzled as moss/ribbon at the throat/beaded bag" and appears"every morning at eight, down the crumbling steps/past columned houses/infested by glories."

My total awe for this collection knows no bounds!

Ruth Moose is a longtime reviewer for The Pilot.