Shared History

Shared History is a book of striking intelligence and formal confidence. Ekphrastic sonnets powerfully evoke the work of Franz Borghese and Edward Hopper, while skillfully rhymed sapphics, heroic couplets about Eroica's composer, and a rondeau about the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are further evidence of the poet's aesthetic reach and metrical flair. Especially moving are several poems of the poet's native Westhampton Beach, Long Island, including sonnets of local people and places lost to time but preserved in poetry that both celebrates and interrogates memory's mixed gifts. "Decades later-," Kreiling writes, "voices stronger, burdens greater- / those of us still here still sing. / With absent voices echoing"-and we are privileged to share their music. -Ned Balbo

Having read-and loved-Jean Kreiling's earlier books, The Truth in Dissonance and Arts & Letters & Love, I was prepared for the rich human content this new manuscript would share with me: family life, travel, nature-especially the sea-and passionate responses to the arts in every genre, all in a lyrical, warmly conversational voice. But Shared History has surprised me after all, and keeps doing so after repeated readings. These irresistible poems celebrate common experience, but also address the inevitable changes and disappearances we all learn to accept: in the emotional weather that surrounds us, in everything time leaves behind, in the memory of one voice that once seemed capable of fixing "almost everything," in lives we thought we already understood. This collection is wise, truthful good company. -Rhina P. Espaillat

Jean L. Kreiling's Shared History is a paean to the loves and the losses we share with those most dear. In poems as various in form as they are accomplished-ranging from stately sonnets to delicate triolets, graceful pentameter couplets to charming rondeaux, haunting eulogies to witty epigrams-Kreiling's poetry sings the song of mortality and the persistence of life and art in the face of it. "Shared joy is double joy; / Shared sorrow is half a sorrow," Kreiling notes in an epigraph from an anonymous writer. Her poems remind us of that wisdom as they embrace the joys and sorrows all human beings face-from Beethoven to Hopper, the Queen of England to Butch Cassidy, and, ultimately, you and me. -Angela Alaimo O'Donnell