Subterranean Address: New & Selected Poems -

Review by Carol Smallwood

A collection that begins with a turnip and ends with a young seal shows the surprise and originality of an award-winning poet in tune with nature and herself. An amazing compilation to enjoy in wonder and delight.

Endorsed by David Kirby

Hurrah for our long-lived poets! This is not to say anything against younger generations. It’s just that a poet like Judith Skillman gives a sense of a world experienced, of well-worn shoes, miles on the odometer, and bike tires whose treads have long been rubbed smooth. Motion is the guiding principle here, not arriving but walking onward “into the state we call unknown,” as one of my favorite poems says, “our not having a map of the future perhaps / enough to keep the road to home whole.” This book is a guide to everything we could possibly know and see in this beautiful, crazy cosmos. So tuck a copy into your backpack, reader, and put yourself in this savvy poet’s hands. You’ll come home wiser, guaranteed.

Endorsed by David Rigsbee

Skillman’s devotion to both the nuances and deeper entailments that life and lineage present us is on show in Subterranean Address: New and Selected Poems. Gathered from her seven most recent collections, with a winning group of new work, Skillman writes of her subjects with matchless clarity. Aging (“To be a tenant of the body/ means one’s chores are never done”), infirmity, family, the natural world, the lives of artists (Kafka, Nabokov, Lucien Freud, et. al.), and history (immigrant destinies, the Shoah)—all with measured feeling, as if to imply a dignity in our imperfection. At her best—and here she is at her best—few poets I know can surpass her evocative powers.

Endorsed by Marcene Gandolfo, Mom Egg Review

As Skillman’s poems seek to understand rather than deny suffering, they rarely conclude in clear resolution; rather, they acknowledge that wounds live unhealed and questions exist unanswered…(the) poems traverse through changes that manifest from living a full life. Her metaphors suggest not shrinking from scars that result from these changes, but instead learning to embrace and accept the wound as an illuminating source.

Endorsed by Samuel Green

In a moment of clearheaded honesty Robert Frost wrote, ‘And some will say all sorts of things/But some mean what they say.’ Judith Skillman’s books remain on our shelves because she not only means what she says, but says it with a clarity and skill that makes her useful in our lives. Any new collection by her is worthy of celebration, but a new & selected poems is worthy of true fanfare.