Home and Away

Through her deft use of form, image, and verbal music, Jean L. Kreiling transfigures ordinary moments - walking around a neighborhood, working at a diner, bringing Christmas ornaments out of storage - into insights about the unknowability of others, the dignity of doing boring tasks well, the clothes of temporary grace. In her moving crown of sonnets, "Home," each home a couple lives in, from first to last, embodies their hopeful spirit, warmth, resilience in grief, and quiet appreciation of one another: "the tiny place could barely hold their wealth." The same could be said of this excellent book.

-Susan McLean, Donald Justice Poetry Prize and Richard Wilbur Award winner

Readers might suspect that this writer who coaxes a crown from the story of Hemingway's four wives, triumphs at ekphrastic triolets, and pulls off the impossible - a rondeau that is also a good poem - would be committed to the "perfect order" of "drinking glasses . . . sorted by size" and "bowls neatly nested," but Jean Kreiling knows better than that: "perfection's mostly counterfeit," she quips. Maybe so. Yet, as Kreiling notes, "Sometimes what keeps your day from being hell / is doing what you do extremely well," and in this collection, Kreiling writes her lucid, precise, evocative poems extremely well, right through the grand finale, a stunner called "Home" that sums up, in seven linked sonnets, a married couple's whole life together. Reader: welcome home.

-Stephen Kampa, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize winner

This is a collection to be read all at once and then slowly, poem by poem, as each reveals new heights of craft and insight. The poems of "Home" offer variations on the timeless themes of intimacy and inevitable loss, and of persevering in the face of that inevitability - the place where "hard- / won compromises strain to guard / against collapse." The poems of "Away" - watching seabirds track the route of an ocean liner, climbing a windy hill to glimpse the sea crash on cliffs, savoring the juxtaposed serenity and squalor of a Caribbean island - present the wide world in which we find ourselves, and truly find ourselves.

-Richard Wakefield, Richard Wilbur Award winner