Insight Out

Teacher, writer, poet, Sandra Allbee Lacy was born and raised in Alamosa, Colorado; has lived in Silverton and Mancos, Colorado; Southern and Central California; Seattle, Washington; Baltimore, Maryland, and Denver, Colorado where she and her husband, Chuck, currently reside. Of herself, she says:My hair is salt and pepper;Each silver strand is earned.My eyes are jade and sparkling made,And once, with passion burned.Im tall enough to reach the groundFrom where my shoulders are,But far as I can stretch, Ive foundI cannot touch a star!The greatest growth Ive made since birthIs twofold, I would say:The first, in gratefulness to pray;The last, Alas! is girth!Sandra Allbee Lacys Insight Out is a very strong collection, filled with surprises in form and in content and remarkable for its care, the deliberateness of its execution. Here we find the poets feelings, a wide range of them, feelings shaped into villanelle and sonnet and other forms arising organically from the poems matter and it is the shapeliness of the collection that is most immediately striking. There are faintly touched-on, ghostly narrative lines in the book the long course of love, the breath-taking interludes and there is the poets on-going dialogue with the Creator (in which she employs the two chief moods of the Psalmist, dismay and thanksgiving). But the center of the book, as it is the axis of each poem, is the commitment to a telling form for what the poem has to tell. In this sense, each poem and the collection as a whole are real achievements. Henry Sloss