Green Hill, Blake Lorna Knowles

Whatever subject Lorna Knowles Blake turns her hand to, she displays a prosodic surefootedness and a continual freshness of perception. Poems as different from one another as Glosa and The Allure of the Ledge will find readers to admire not only Blakes skill but the literary culture that she makes her own.--Charles Martin, 2017 Able Muse Book Award judge

Lorna Knowles Blake gives us GREEN HILL, poems both dark and lightheartedly inventive, the craft casual, poised--and audacious. Here, our twenty-first century Blake boldly converses with her nineteenth-century namesake, William Blake, as well as with Duke Ellington, St. John of the Cross, and others in musically dazzling poems set free to feel / the hook, the dock, the sun, the real / experience. What is the real experience? It is the sense of home. The title poem begins, So many ways to remember a house, and Blake means all abodes, from a hermit crabs shell to a refugees home / the day after the raid. Relationships, too, become houses as Blake evokes moments of tenderness in a mature marriage and fears for the future--though in this deft, understatedly mythic book, the background world is still shades of green.--Molly Peacock