to one who bends my time - Deerbrook Editions

Sarah's first book has reviews, links here

A review appeared in American Book Review

Sarah is also the author of Wars Don't Happen Anymore

Praise for to one who bends my time

In her craftily honed poems that neither waste words nor the opportunity to explore their connotations and sonic connections, Sarah White shows us how selectively memories persist—in minute often strange details, in uncanny dreams, in the body’s traces. But the poet’s vision here tends not only to the past, for from her particular “bend in time” she looks ahead as well as back with welcome clarity, wise acuteness, and sly tenderness.

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont

What a pleasure to read Sarah White’s to one who bends my time! These poems reveal intelligence and heart through their self-effacing candor and formal inventiveness. They are truthful in displaying the cruel accidents of circumstance and calculated human cruelties, following the poet’s own ethic that “the truth be told with humor and rue.” Like the sun moving out from behind storm clouds, this work progresses from dark to light, from past pain to present happiness, a creative restoration that is the ongoing gift of White’s poetry.

—Jane Augustine, author of A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing

In a day when emotional blackmail passes for poetry and content providers pass for poets, it is indeed a pleasure to discover a poet who reminds us that poetry is an art, especially one who does so with grace, wit, sophistication, and honesty. Sarah White is that poet. I can think of no poems that better exemplify Robert Frost’s maxim, “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” than the poems in to one who bends my time. Get this book. It belongs in your poetry collection right next to Elizabeth Bishop and Stevie Smith. If you don’t have Bishop and Smith, then get those too.

—J.R. Solonche, author of Beautiful Day

The pleasures in Sarah White’s wise and lovely collection are many For example, the ten “Intercalation” poems cleverly weave pairs of voices that can jar against each other or harmonize, like the Hail Mary and New York subway announcements. At the heart of her work, time bends as light does through water, the past reaching out to touch the present moment. She recalls a long-ago failed relationship, the shame of which “dwindles when/the grown woman regards the girl,” but memory brings back tender joy as well. Her seven-year old son responds to a broken toy by “pronouncing a maxim/worthy of the Dalai Lama:/I guess it’s a mistake/to get attached to a balloon.” As she says in the collection’s final poem, “Choose, from a calendar/of some past year, an hour/or minute/to live again – whatever’s in it.” That is exactly what these poems achieve, in language clear and radiant as light.

—Steven Klepetar, author of The Return of the Bride of Frankenstein

Sarah White has composed a book at once intimate and universal, the story of her own life. Once begun, it’s hard to put down. You’ll want to arrive at the next novel blend of revelation and style, candor and invention. The poems must be read at least twice, first devoured whole, like scallops or a bag of peanuts, then slowly, to savor the wisdom, to delight in the wit and surprises, and to absorb the anger, fun, forgiveness, love. This rich, rounded self-portrait seems to leave out nothing, from childhood, girlhood, and marriage, through divorce, romance, motherhood, age—all conveyed in elegant, accessible verse. to one who bends my time is self-scrutiny without solipsism or self-pity; it is serious and erudite without feeling esoteric or solemn. The collection enchants as it chants, whistles as it works. As enduring poetry should, it affords both profit and delight.

—Robert Wexelblatt, author of Heiburg’s Twitch, and The Artist Wears Rough Clothing.