What Lies Beyond
Poems
Judith Farr
ISBN: 978-0-9991062-8-0
61 pages; 6 x 9 in. $15.95
Judith Farr, Professor Emerita of English and American Literature at Georgetown University, is a poet, novelist and literary critic. She has been publishing poetry since Marianne Moore selected her verse to appear in the Riverside Anthology (1958) when she was a teenager. A well-known Dickinson scholar, her books include The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard UP, 1992), a “Notable Book” of The New York Times and winner of the Association of American Publishers’ Prize for Literary Criticism. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard UP, 2004) won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy for the Best Book Written on a Literary Topic by a Woman that year. In 2009-10, the New York Botanical Garden mounted an exhibition based on the book. Her novel I Never Came to You in White (1996) about Dickinson’s school years was runner-up for the PEN-Hemingway Prize of the Los Angeles Times. She has lectured at many cultural and educational institutions, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Museum of Women in the Arts, Barnard College, and the Smithsonian Institution.
From the Back Cover
Judith Farr’s literary talents are known, and now she gives us new poetry with mastery of language, lasting characters; her soul and heart connected to the word. A seasoned writer keeps the promise that storytelling becomes poetry only when language is renewed with beauty. I love reading Farr’s created events; especially the artists and historical figures she breathes alive with craft and grace. Writing the long-form narrative means holding change and continuity together. T he strategies and techniques are beneath the line, but we don’t read these poems for “technique,” as fine as it is, but for the life energy in Judith Farr’s imagination. And we read because we want the humaneness that’s found there.
—Grace Cavalieri, T he Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
Judith Farr was interviewed by Grace Cavalieri and the podcast will be up in 2 weeks.
A podcast interview with Grace Cavalieri
“She required bloom,” the gardener declares and, “throwing the shutters open”—poetry ensues. At once magisterial and tender, elegant and earthy, economical and resplendent, these poems are imbued with authority of voice and breath taking beauty. Judith Farr’s What Lies Beyond is, quite simply, an astonishing book.
—Maxine Silverman, author of Transport of the Aim, Palimpsest, and Shiva Moon
If ever there was a book of poetry that reminded me of a garden, this is it. But not just any old garden. Reading Judith Farr’s What Lies Beyond is like walking through an Eden, a resplendent botanical garden in late May or early June, vast, varied, brimming with blooms, a delightful surprise of color and perfume around every manicured twist and turn. But you are not strolling alone because Farr has company for you: Rembrandt, Jacques Louis David, Emily Bronte, Robert E. Lee’s youngest daughter, Mildred, and especially Emily Dickinson. Farr is master of both the narrative and the lyric; the pitch-perfect sonnets and the seamless quatrains will bring you through the door to her luminous garden again and again.
—J.R. Solonche, author of I, Emily Dickinson, and Beautiful Day