Living with Time

CHANGE AS IT SHAPES OUR LIVES

Libby Van Buskirk casts a poet's eye on nature, finding rich images as we follow her imagination. It is a pleasure to read her work which includes detailed observations of the world around her, as she plays with light and color - all presented in words for us to savor.

-Madeleine May Kunin, Governor of Vermont and author, Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties and Walk with Me: Poems

"We've been together for so long, / the world and I," VanBuskirk writes in Living with Time, and these poems are elegies both for the world and for her late husband, whose sudden loss and all its "newly unfamiliar seasons" she writes through. She is as strongly wedded to his spirit - she warns friends that he will be coming with her ("Just don't ignore him. Act familiar.") - as to the natural world, one bounded by a north-country summer lake in all its moods. In a poem that never says the word moon, we see and hear it in her description of the lake: "A milky stare, / a cow's soft eye." A close observer of the natural world - the heron wades "with halted bridesmaid steps" - VanBuskirk writes toward simple statements that become charged with metaphorical meaning: "Oh, fragile dawn, you grew / before you woke me," and "The fields are full, / and this is the warm dry night needed before haying." These are poems of dreams and of memory - the "spectral notes" of the loon calling "from dark distances or near coves" - and poems of growth, finding consolation in poetry even as she grieves: "Our final words / can never grow sufficient."

-Rebecca Starks, winner, Rattle's Neil Postman Award and author, Time is Always Now and Fetch, Muse

In Living with Time, nature's ferocity and nearness "elevate[s] our senses" with vigor and delight as life calls for change and separation in startling ways. With courage, humor, tenderness, and strength, VanBuskirk shares an intimacy that only poetry can provide.

-Ray Hudson, artist and author, Moments Rightly Placed