Susan Kelly-DeWitt Poetry
What others have said:
Cover praise for The Fortunate Islands:
Order from Marick Press
These poems take pleasure in the multiplicity of things—“each blossom shakes/ out the night’s wet mix// of stars and dark”—whatever personal loss or change. Their power is in their spiritual longing. They are graceful, so accurate and deep in their discernment—I have different favorites with every reading.
–Dennis Schmitz,
author of Truth Squad, Copper Canyon Press
“Read reviews of The Fortunate Islands here:”
Susan Kelly-DeWitt breaks our hearts and puts them together again with words. She extends our palpable sense of the child at the mercy of the loved, feared, drunken father made flesh by Roethke’s poem. Here, we are undefended—no fun with this father—we are inside the child’s fear. As we must, we recoil from the alcoholic father; but like his daughter, we also empathize and pity him: “…it will seem to those who love him/that some invisible shrapnel festers his soul.” Like her, we wonder “What was it that tore/his insides?” Finally, we too are freed by her dream wish of the Feather River’s rising “to lift/his cumbersome skiff/into the open sea.” Susan Kelly-DeWitt follows Ptolemy, choosing to run her prime meridian, her original orientation, through the Fortunate Islands, where “the past seems far away// I can cross the wooden bridge/in either direction.” And illuminated along the way by her stunning imagery, her brilliant conjunctions of language, art, personal history, we hasten to follow her.
–Carole Simmons Oles,
author of Waking the Stone, University of Arkansas Press
These poems are sure-footed, engaging, broad in subject matter but grounded in the poet’s wary detective-mind. I have a strong feeling for the most “psychological” of the poems, and those with psychological twists in the last stanza. The poems in this collection feel emotionally complete.
–Sandra McPherson,
author of Expectation Days, University of Illinois Press
The Fortunate Islands cover art is from the
painting Isla Doncella by Rafael Trelles, Puerto Rico.
Visit his website
About The Book of Insects:
Here is the consummate observer struggling to locate a stable locus of observation - a stasis if you will - between the artist’s paradoxically opposed needs to probe and dissect each experience for understanding while at the same time maintaining it whole.”Put simply,” writes the poet in “Van Gogh at Auvers,” “I want to bleed/stillness from the center of this wild/breeze,…”. No one comes closer to achieving this goal than Susan Kelly-DeWitt.
–Carol Frith,
from Poetry Now
About A Camellia for Judy:
I’m glad Frith Press has brought out the few poems that are packaged in this unassuming chapbook. As if following the dictum of William Carlos Williams, “No ideas but in things,” Kelly-DeWitt’s poems show so much in a few lines – a scene, an epiphany, a deeply felt emotion. They also share the craft and erudition, as well as the empathy and compassion, of Kelly-DeWitt’s teacher Denise Levertov. Perhaps their humility comes from being rooted in a place whose time has not yet come. And that may be a good thing. They are not full of themselves.
–Jane Blue,
from The Montserrat Review
About The Land:
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a poet of natural nouns; she points directly at things — flowers and trees, animals and insects; grandmothers and Iron Age murder victims. She uses all the primary colors, and silver, carmine, pink and lemon as well. In this latest book there are mockingbirds, owls, egrets, alligators, wolves, rats, lizards and spiders. There are oaks and dogwood, fungi and roses, tulips and cedars. And to all of these Kelly-DeWitt brings her precise, scientist-like descriptions…….she creates by naming what exists in the world around her, observing with empathy and without overt judgment.
–James DenBoer,
from Poetry Now
Cover Praise for Feather’s Hand:
Angels, saints and sages populate these very material, very quotidian, delightful poems, speaking in noisy inner voices the pained, humorous truths of our world.
–Marilyn Nelson
Cover Praise for To A Small Moth:
Kelly- DeWitt’s poems remind us, as we must be reminded, that no matter what, a beautiful and timeless world surrounds us; we must take the time to peer into it, but if we have Kelly-DeWitt’s wisdom and willingness, her hard-earned grace and vision, we may be privileged enough to participate in ancient and sacred ways.
–Walter Pavlich
