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Windshift
Barbara Loots, one of America’s best light verse poets for several decades, shows us her more reflective side in Windshift. Both her meditative poems and her witty poems display craft, love of music in language, and a deep understanding of human frailties and aspirations.
—A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze and Slander, and Richard Wilbur Award winner for The Secret Life of Women
—A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze and Slander, and Richard Wilbur Award winner for The Secret Life of Women
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 22, 2018
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About the author
Barbara Loots
28 books1 followerBarbara Loots lives in Kansas City, Missouri. She formerly worked as a writer at Hallmark.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 15, 2018
Rarely does a poetry book appeal to readers of such differing tastes. Loots (rhymes with “notes”) is a master of formal verse, if that’s your preference. Although I prefer free verse, I love her work, too. She makes metered rhyme look easy and sound conversational. Form never gets in the way of function or enjoyment in her poems. What surprises me most is that I plan to buy a couple of gift copies for friends who rarely read poetry, because her cat poems will delight any cat owner and just might lure them into finishing the book.
Windshift also speaks to a broad range of readers because it’s really four books in one. The numbered sections are organized by theme and mood. “I. Shoreline” is lyrical, relaxing, and meditative. Loots takes us on her annual retreat to a family island without plumbing or electricity and turns us loose in nature. “II. Sunday School,” treats us to well-known Bible stories from a new perspective. Cats and women, who had no choice but to let ancient men speak for them, get their chance to modify the record. “III. Goose Sense” allows Loots to go beyond her usual wry humor to hilarity, and “IV. In a Glass Darkly” covers the inescapable downside of life, because we can’t experience humor and joy without seeing their shadows lurking.
Nothing can show Loots’s range as well as samples from the four sections of Windshift:
I.
“Uncertain rhythm of
sunlight dissolving
taps on the leaftips
plicking and plucking
the harps of white hair [spider webs].”
(“Mysteriously Still”)
II.
After the flood, Noah’s life returned to the same old tasks and hardships he’d always faced,
“but no one to shake his fist at,
no secret cause to gloat.
And Noah yearned for a reason
to build him another boat.”
(“When the Waters Went Down”)
III.
“My cat has a number of places she sits in.
The sliver of chair where my derrière fits in.
The top of the pillow when my head is on it.
The paper on which I am writing a sonnet.”
(“My Cat Has a Number of Places”)
IV.
“So she is dead before we even thought
that she was sick. She chose. The cancer grew
with no “courageous battle” ever fought,
no patronage, no probing interview . . .
(“Obituary”)
Windshift also speaks to a broad range of readers because it’s really four books in one. The numbered sections are organized by theme and mood. “I. Shoreline” is lyrical, relaxing, and meditative. Loots takes us on her annual retreat to a family island without plumbing or electricity and turns us loose in nature. “II. Sunday School,” treats us to well-known Bible stories from a new perspective. Cats and women, who had no choice but to let ancient men speak for them, get their chance to modify the record. “III. Goose Sense” allows Loots to go beyond her usual wry humor to hilarity, and “IV. In a Glass Darkly” covers the inescapable downside of life, because we can’t experience humor and joy without seeing their shadows lurking.
Nothing can show Loots’s range as well as samples from the four sections of Windshift:
I.
“Uncertain rhythm of
sunlight dissolving
taps on the leaftips
plicking and plucking
the harps of white hair [spider webs].”
(“Mysteriously Still”)
II.
After the flood, Noah’s life returned to the same old tasks and hardships he’d always faced,
“but no one to shake his fist at,
no secret cause to gloat.
And Noah yearned for a reason
to build him another boat.”
(“When the Waters Went Down”)
III.
“My cat has a number of places she sits in.
The sliver of chair where my derrière fits in.
The top of the pillow when my head is on it.
The paper on which I am writing a sonnet.”
(“My Cat Has a Number of Places”)
IV.
“So she is dead before we even thought
that she was sick. She chose. The cancer grew
with no “courageous battle” ever fought,
no patronage, no probing interview . . .
(“Obituary”)
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