A Clear Burning
Poems
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About the Book
“A Clear Burning” depicts the changing passions of a woman looking back
from the autumn of life at many shades and stages of experience. Whether
the focus is on romantic love, family, death, loss or today’s world, her work intensely pursues its subject using precise language, varied imagery from the natural world and subtle musicality. What comes through is a distinctly female voice,courageous and true.
"Mixing active intelligence with the fine art of plain, speedy statement; marrying her coolly realistic eye to her sensuously attentive pleasure in the complex of textures, growth, and change by which we are surrounded, Natalie Safir fashions in A Clear Burning a credible world of edgy yet steady responsiveness. Reading these richly figured poems we "learn about delicacy and transformation," and are, again and again, enlightened."
-- Eamon Grennan
"What is the texture of desire?´ asks Natalie Safir, and the disarming surface simplicity of these taut lyrics gives way, upon re-readings, to ´another layer beneath the last, and another´ as the poet, always ´poised/on the rim of not knowing,´ immerses herself in sleep and dreams as counter spell to ´merciless fact.´ And in language -- these sensual poems, at times ekphrastic or Jungian (´twinned at the source´) or sacramental, resound in their ´fragile revelations.´ A Clear Burning is a book of deep and wild sustenance."
-- Michael Waters
About the Author
NATALIE SAFIR has been publishing poems in small literary journals for several decades, and her work has been anthologized in college texts: Reading Poetry, Random House Educational Division, Literature, The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry, and Responding to Literature, 3rd 4th and 5th editions. Her books published are Moving into Seasons, l981 and To Face the Inscription, 1987. Singular Speech Press published Made Visible in 1998. Poet and then Chairman of the Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence, Thomas Lux, wrote: "I admire very much these utterly lucid, distilled, and powerful poems." She teaches poetry writing, 'writing as healing', and is a practicing Gestalt therapist.