Susan Blanshard

Send The Raven Susan Blanshard

In Send The Raven, the very poems themselves are like messengers. Sent by the poet, they touchon the symbolist, metaphysical, soothsayer, and nostalgic-which may hold keys or passwords to the larger legend of life. Here, acknowledgement of the human spirit is evident, not separable, from her writing. Susan brings a variety of past worlds to life by reversing and elaborating traditional stanzas and bringing soothsaying echoes of historic form to light. As with previous works, epic book-length prose of Sheetstone, Honey in the Blood, and the poetry of Fragments of the Human Heart, Quieter Histories Winter to Winter, Poems from the Alley, Blanshard connects epochs of time with witty irony, subtlety, elegance, imagination, and notable sensuality. Send the Raven is a continuum of the dialogue with past and present histories, what is inherited, possessed and dispossessed; what is remembered and what is known. A passionate conversation that exists at the centre of her poetry.