What You Hear in the Dark.

What You Hear in the Dark

Sonia Gernes

University of Notre Dame Press 

310 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA

www.undpress.nd.edu [phone]

0268029687 $20.00 176 pages

"What You Hear in the Dark: New and Selected Poems" includes selections of the best of three previously published books of poetry by Sonia Gernes, including her book, "A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor: Poems/Tales," published in 1997. There are three sections of new poems in addition to reprised selected poems from 'Brief Lives' and 'Women at Forty' and selections from 'A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor.' Gernes is inimitable in her art which has been called "The telling of tales with grace and wit" through poetry. Her poetry helps the reader experience the eternal and the universal by delving into the personal, minutiae reconsidered leading to an experience of the divine. Deeply searching, fresh and shot through with light and images, here are poems to light your soul's unquiet journey. A quotation has been selected from 10. Pipestone:

Indian Joe in his quarry hut /told me this. He carves/ paperweights, arrowheads,/ the little pipe I'm sending you./ Pipestone is part of our flesh,/ he said, red men a part of this stone/ Then, why do you sell it? I said,/ looking off toward the quarry shelf./ This is a place of peace, he said,/ war clubs are buried, angers gone./ The seventh direction is self,/ he said. When you white men pray,/ does it come from breath -/ does it come from bone?

"What You Hear in the Dark" is a masterful collection of songs, of singing words, of pictures, of ideas, of poetry. It will lead you to wondrous places.