PEARS, LAKE, SUN
Poems by Sandy Solomon

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Sandy Solomon’s poems have appeared in many publications, among them New Republic, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Threepenny Review, and Times Literary Supplement. She was founding executive director of two national nonprofit organizations representing low-income people and their communities and is an independent writer / editor in Princeton, New Jersey.

Winner of the 1995 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

“In the brilliant surfaces and reflections of Pears, Lake, Sun, Sandy Solomon catches the moods and ambiguities of the very late twentieth century where harrowing events exist side by side with ghostly flashes of beauty. These are tough-minded poems, impeccably crafted, full of passionate stillness and disciplined commotion, that refuse to look away from the barbarities of our high civilizations.” - Maura Stanton

“Sandy Solomon’s poems - excellently felt and seen - have for some time been rewarding those who leaf through our best magazines. It is good news that they are now gathered into a (deservedly) prize-winning volume.” - Richard Wilbur

“These are poems with a sense of history, a sense of menace. And yet these are also poems which know how to make a landscape sunny and an urban vista downright, actual, and believable. This is a lyrical and ambitious book where nothing is easily found but where the discoveries allow the reader into achieved language and true feeling.” - Evan Boland

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In the New Country: English English, Body English

Words emerge oddly in cahoots.
Shilly-shallying when they should move,
rushing when they should pause, they turn obtuse.
Yet who could mistake them on a page? I listen

but can’t hear, and the conversation lurches -
wrong note, missed catch, half my quips flubbed
from the start, quirks of meaning quite apart.
Not not my language, but distinctly theirs.

I’m too old for this stuff, for sounding dumb and shifting
in my chair, trying, when the words obstruct,
to mime response - unsubtle smiles or frowns.

Beyond the window, in the square, a man
swings and swings a stick till his dog, blind
as any, tracks the “throw”. Then they let go.

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PEARS, LAKE, SUN
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover design: Gary Gore. Cover Art: ‘Pot of Flowers and Pears’, by Paul Cezanne. Courtesy of Courtland Institute Galleries, London.
Publication: 1996 (84 pages laminated paperback)