October House
Subtitle
Poems
In "October House" by Bonny Barry Sanders, we discover a sequence of memory segments that flash back and haunt us — sometimes with the fantasy of allegory, sometimes with painful realism — but with all segments united through the many years and between the four walls of an old house. The architecture of the house serves to suggest both an actual place and a conscious, mental construct of qualities. It evokes a transcendence. Bird song, musical structure, and strong assonance underpin this work. The architecture of the book, like the old house, is defined as well as fluid. Like the architecture of an orchestral piece, it begins with the tonic chord, moves, digresses, modulates, presents variations upon themes, and finally returns to the tonic chord. The book explores the ways we must find strength to return home, not necessarily to a place, but to "the language we would speak again."
Bio
Bonny Barry Sanders earned a Master of Arts in English at Arizona State University in 1983.
Praise for this book
Sanders’ new collection of poems, 'October House,' has this strange lyric authority mixed with details, both vivid and sweet; she has a Saxon gift reminiscent of someone like the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. A brilliant and memorable new book.
Norman Dubie
In an era when so many poetry books are built around singular subjects and narrow focus, it’s a real treat to come across a book that casts its eyes on family, nature, history, art, society, on living, really, like Sanders’ 'October House.' These poems are just as at home in the natural world of raccoons, egrets, and red-shouldered hawks as they are at making real the history of sound. Part Frost, part Whitman, and part Dickinson, these poems are all energy and light. The work of an artist who honors the world with every detail she includes, every story she chooses to tell.
Jack B. Bedell
