Late Psalm (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

by Betsy Sholl

Late Psalm takes themes from those ancient songs of joy and grief and transposes them into the language of contemporary life.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2004

About the author

Betsy Sholl has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009). Don't Explain won the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin, and her book The Red Line won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Pick A Card, winner of the Maine Chapbook Competition in 1991, and Betsy Sholl: Greatest Hits, 1974-2004, Pudding House Publications. She was a founding member of Alice James Books and published three collections with them: Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter and Rooms Overhead. Among her awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and two Maine Writer's Fellowships. Her work has been included in several anthologies, including Letters to America, Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and a range of magazines, including Field, Triquarterly, Brilliant Corners, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal. She has been a visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh and Bucknell University. She lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College.

As of March 1, 2006, Betsy Sholl was chosen to be the Poet Laureate of Maine, a five-year position named by the governor.

Reviews

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Betsy Sholl's poems connect their powerful images beyond the page and deep into the senses. Small things burst suddenly into the momentous-a lobster in a tank to all our futile efforts to stave off mortality; food that cannot be eaten by a sick friend confirming the fact of it. Her poems carry a deceptive stillness, until suddenly you realize, carried along by the simple force of Betsy's careful choices, perfect construction, that the poem is spiraling upwards; both emotionally and poetically opening, drawing the reader further in.

Her poetry speaks of opposition, of balancing. In “Messengers Falling to Our Aid,” she spells this out with the words “…not all messengers pour out vials/of destruction…” While Betsy's poems identify with the damaged and desperate, she never condescends, never gives in to despair, always granting full humanity to the sick, the suffering, the dispossessed, whether human or beast.

Betsy has an uncanny ability to place herself inside the suffering of others, without letting the poems become weighed down by it. She still is able to maintain the necessary distance to get the poem down, get it right.

In the poem “Photographer,” she writes of “…things as they are, not the myth.” And with her poetry, there is the ever-questing to get at the root, at the essence of things. In “Boardwalk,” she writes of our already being immersed in the world, and her poems are about doing so without giving in to the temptation to avert one's eyes, but to experience, fully, and record it all, honestly.

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second half of this collection is stronger than the first, which seems preoccupied with death and loss. The grief is embedded in the poems to such an extent that it interferes with the reader's ability to make a strong connection to the work. These poems give the impression they were composed more as a vehicle for working through the poet's loss than with any particular audience in mind; they seem a bit cryptic, almost too private. However, the poems in part II are less self-conscious and easier to connect with, like Sholl's magnificent portrayal of a neighborhood run soundtracked by jazz on a slowly draining Walkman battery in "Stray Horn" and the ducks polarized to "a man's / magnetic bag of crumbs" in "Because We Imagine a Journey."