Bring Me Her Heart
“After her first book of surprises (elated statements of that self which delights to be conscious of its duties), we hardly expect that rarest of pleasures again, and we can only be astonished in a larger sense by the exchange of surprise for wisdom, for that kind of patient inquiry into old stories and popular superstitions which reveals an underlying truth. These poems are accomplished, and what the anew accomplish is our interest, our recall, our gain.”

--Richard Howard

“Getty’s wit, human sympathy, and incisive control of language are here in abundance, in poems that range from the tightly formal “3:00 A.m.: Questioning Cassieopeia” to others that enlarge the boundaries of poetry. From meditative monologues spoken by luminaries of literature and poems that refresh old stories, Bring Me Her Heart proceeds to more intimate things, among them a moving sequence on the last days and remembered life of an aged mother. It’s a book of impressive skill and variety.”

--X. J. Kennedy

“Too many writers have been trapped by the advice that one should write about what one knows into writing about themselves. That they should instead interpret the old saw to mean that they ought to learn more is the lesson Getty’s poetry resoundingly inculcates. Because she knows literary biography, Getty can write absorbing and thought-provoking dramatic monologues in the personas of the elderly Alice Liddell, who was Lewis Carroll’s Alice as a child, and of Henry David Thoreau as the bothersome neighbor of Hawthorne and Emerson. Because she knows classic folk and fairy tales, she can sharply re-imagine Snow White in the title poem and the Frog Prince in “Conservation of Frogs.” Because she knows Greek religion, she can powerfully bring it to bear on her mother’s decline and death and her own accommodation to it in the suite of poems that makes up the third section of this book, “Eleusis.” Because she knows her own mind, she can put in perspective even her dedication to poetry (see “The Earth Is Saying”). Because she has learned her craft, she makes meter, rhyme, and formal stanzas the vehicles of winning, natural expression.”

--Starred review in ALA’s Booklist

Also by Sarah Getty: The Land of Milk and Honey

Read other poems by Sarah Getty

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