Lorna Knowles Blake
Reviews of Green Hill
In the poems in Green Hill, Lorna Knowles Blake takes the intimacies of human life and the riots of nature and transmutes them into forms that both discipline and liberate their beauty.
By doing so, she also reveals the real, the secret, sovereign of that beauty—the human imagination, of which hers is a triumphant example.
—Vijay Seshadri
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Author of 3 Sections
Moving and masterful, the poems in Lorna Blake’s
Green Hill don’t just reveal an exquisite formal sensibility—
they conduct passionate and original meditations on our fundamental need for form. In poems about art work and landscape, myth and love, Blake considers the ways we give shape and meaning to our lives.
And her poems are themselves vital enactments of that same urge. American poetry is richer for this superb collection.
—Peter Campion,
Author of El Dorado
Lorna Knowles Blake gives us Green Hill, poems both dark and lightheartedly inventive, the craft casual, poised—and audacious. Here our 21st century Blake boldly converses with her 19th-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 this 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 crab’s shell to a “refugee’s home/the day after the raid.” Relationships, too, become houses as she 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,
Author of The Analyst