Ice Skating in the Sculpture Garden

Abstract

This collection includes a prologue and three ten-poem sections. In an attempt to sit quietly, to see and hear as clearly as possible, the poems include much tea-drinking, museum-going, and people-watching. Though most of these poems are in free verse, the vast majority employ traditional line and stanza lengths, as well as consonance and assonance, and the occasional echo of pentameter. At the same time, they try to remain true to the rhythms and vocabulary of American and Canadian speech. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, and Anne Porter, the poems are concerned with the observation of light, the distance between people, the sound of the language, and with finding art in the everyday and the everyday in art.