Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Poets and Poems: Laurie Klein and “Where the Sky Opens”


How do you deal with what many insurance companies rather blandly call “major life events,” those significant happenings that allow you to change your insurance policies? We know what they mean – the death of a spouse, parent, or child; a divorce; a new baby.

But many other life events can be called major and significant – a physical move to a new home, new part of the country, or even a new country; a serious illness; spouses separating; a family crisis that leads to division and walls; perhaps even a spouse changing his or her philosophy of life – the one you’ve known for years, the one that’s helped to anchor you as well as your spouse. Suddenly, and it can be sudden, life is unhinged. The ground has shifted; the landscape has become unfamiliar.

That is the sense of Laurie Klein’s newly published collection of poems, Where the Sky Opens: A Partial Cosmography. What was known as normal and established has disappeared, sometimes within ourselves, and something new has to be recognized and charted.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.


Top photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

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