Suicide Psalms

By Mari-Lou Rowley

'Suicide Psalms' is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1895636922
• ISBN13: 9781895636925
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Anvil Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 0.3" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Word Wizardry

Mari-Lou Rowley does not so much evoke experiences as she does the feelings that go with them by sending word-avalanches to tumble and explode around her readers, word-waterfalls that cascade through and past us, and (but only occasionally) word-droplets that gather in quiet, reflective pools. At the start of one poem, she shows us a wasp trapped in a spider's web, gradually coiling and uncoiling until it's free. The father of the narrator has, by contrast, been trapped, cocooned and doomed--and that image spoke to my apprehension early in my reading of these poems. I felt that I had wandered into places where it was emotionally dangerous for me to go, and that if I did not make my way with care, the author's ability to make mood and feeling out of words would pin me: I would struggle only at my peril. But this poet (and my friend) knows what she is doing. In the first section ("Suicide Psalms") she catches our imaginations with her sharp-edged, moving images of loss, abandonment and death, in the second ("Hermitage Poems") she takes us deep into the solitude of the writing act--and lets us hear with her the howls of the ghosts and wild animals that haunt that solitude--but in the third ("Survival Psalms") she provides a blessing and redemption--received by her and then conveyed to us, it seems--returning us safely to ground, to reality, to life and love.