Sarah Cotterill's poems bring together the dramas of ordinary life and a complex understanding of the natural world. The poems are moments of suspension: early bridges braided of things found on the ground, in the wild. They are meant for travel on foot and in solitude. When we trust our weight to one, the whole of the bridge shifts, though the lines and their connections remain firm; and the bridge shifts again with each step. Its symmetry changes, our perspective changes. We are exposed, reminded of the delicacy of its materials, and of their strength, tensile strength. On ever side looms the world's great beauty and also its peril, the long drop. The flexibility of a web accounts for much of its strength and resiliency. So, too, are these poems shaped by a lyric, flexible, resilient language, a range and variability of image, form, and tone. But always they are tied to the poet's experience, the great and small events of a private life at once lived and observed. These poems never stray far from awareness of the strangeness, elegance, and peril of the natural world, or of humankind's place therein. They never stray far either from a sense of the fragility of human ties, their infinite worth, the care which must be taken to sustain them, the costs of inattention. These poems are moments of suspension. They begin on ground we know. When we step away from the far close of their span, we find ourselves in a new place. Lucky for the bridge being there. Grateful.
Sarah Cotterill is a native of a rural upstate New York. She received a B. A. from Swarthmore College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. She has been a Yaddo Fellow and has received grants from the Maryland Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared previously in journals and in The Hive Burning, a chapbook. She currently lives in Maryland and teaches at the Writers' Center in Bethesda.
"Cotterill's lyrics inscribe a sensitivity so finely tuned and so radically receptive that it must be strung together with the utmost rigor. The resulting poems comprise some of the most painfully exquisite music that I know of." --Jonathan Holden "In this density of words there coexists that lightness of musical phrasing that carries the reader along through the connections of images, sounds, words." West Branch "Sarah Cotterill's first book reveals a ripened gift, powerful and thrilling. Her overall tone has a quality of sobriety and melancholy out of which she attains moments of earned ecstasy. Sentimentality is entirely absent. Her themes are personal in the best, most felt-through way, and are at the same time infused with a sense of the larger world - of history and pre-history, and of our own time of 'ambition, adversaries, and presidents.' The way craft and vision act in complete and necessary harmony in these poems brilliantly (and profoundly) illustrates the meaning of Pound's 'Dichten=Condensare' as I understand it." --Denise Levertov "Sensual, intelligent, and possessed of a quiet Puritan genius, these poems are a mysterious celebration of a characteristic life." --Jean Valentine "With a clear eye and a music both tough and delicate, Sarah Cotterill's poems braid together the astonishing dramas of ordinary human life and a complex, precise understanding of the natural world. This welcome book will give pleasure, re-reading after re-reading." --William Matthews
