Say What You Can

Say What You Can

Poems

by Elizabeth Tibbetts

6 x 9; 100 pages; $16.95

available now

 




 

Elizabeth Tibbetts’ book In the Well won the Bluestem Poetry Award in 2002. Her chapbook Perfect Selves (2001) was published by Oyster River Press. Her awards include a fellowship and grant from the Maine Arts Commission, and the Penobscot Watershed Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as: The American Scholar, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prairie Schooner, to name a few.  Her poems also appear in: Maine in Four Seasons (Down East Books, 2010); and Take Heart: More Poems from Maine (Down East Books, 2016).

Preview of Say What You Can

 

From the back cover

I was unprepared for this book. Unprepared for the emotion that washed over me, the depth of empathy I felt for my fellow humans, the awe of poetry’s power. I was going to say that in this time of strife we need poetry; what I mean is, we need this poetry.

—Monica Wood

For decades now, Elizabeth Tibbetts has been writing luminous, intelligent, beautiful poems. Now they will be published by Deerbrook Editions, maker of beautiful books. This is a true gift of beauty to lovers of poetry – please, yes, Say What You Can Elizabeth.

—Gary Lawless

It’s such a pleasure to traverse the world with Elizabeth Tibbetts. She is a poet of keen senses and great generosity. She finds awe and beauty everywhere—in slugs mating, in cigarettes “flickering like insects.” She imagines the Holy Ghost in that “wing-flicker of wind on my neck,” and watches the almost-full moon drop “her light garments onto the water.” Tibbetts knows the earth in all its seasons, and the human heart as well. She is attentive to both as only a lover can be. In her poems sensual experience becomes a school for soul making. And that means the harder aspects of our shared life are also here—the dying patients she tends as a nurse, the various threats to our environment, the unease of being alone in a foreign country. Say What You Can implies there is much that can’t be said. But these poems, by embracing both “sweetness and grief, those fraternal twins,” have plenty to say about human depths and desires. T his is a wise and beautiful book by an immensely gifted poet.

—Betsy Sholl