​I call shinbones of water skinnying down into sluice boxes.
Brackish water, sulfur-smelling water, sludge.
Rain in rain barrels,
clear water spilling over dams
and clear water that has never been dammed.

I confront the brink
even though I’m part of the brink. 
                                                       
from "We Have the Power to Pull Back from the Brink"



​Ellery Akers is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance. She’s won thirteen national writing awards, including an IPPY Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and in Poetry and The New York Times Magazine.

I was introduced to Ellery over email by our mutual friend, the poet Ruth Schwartz. At our first meeting, Ellery and I took a walk around a small pond. I quickly realized that Ellery was an extraordinary ecologist, who knew so much about the flora and fauna of West Marin, as well as a woman brimming with love for good poetry. Not only would she recite lines from Hopkins or Dickinson by heart to me as we walked and talked, but she and I would engage in delightful conversations about newer work from modern poets that we’d just read.

We have been friends for several years now, and workshop together regularly in a wonderful group that Ellery invited me to join. But I love Ellery for more than all of this. Ellery is also one of the most dedicated environmentalists I know, and through her incredible new book, Swerve, has inspired me to feel less hopeless and more willing to take action to save our planet. I feel such admiration, respect, and deep gratitude to Ellery; consider reading her work, as you will too!
                                   ~Julia B. Levine, July 2020

​I encountered Sonia Greenfield for the first time at a reading of ekphrastic poems that I participated in at the Riverside Art Museum last August.  I was bowled over by her “Nafsicrate Considers Bruegel’s Famous Work”:

I told Daedalus to watch him, goddammit,
so now here I am waiting for my son
 to breaststroke home to me, held up on fingers
of green foam. Waiting past the rise and fall
of Rome through to Pieter’s brushwork
which rendered the sun like a lemon on fire . . . . 

I loved the point of view in this poem, the implicit war between the parents, the portrait of infinite, focused and pragmatic mother-love which maintains even self-deceiving hope. And I promptly bought Sonia Greenfield's first book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, winner of the 2014 Codhill Poetry Award. Greenfield's fierce and witty work is highly inventive, and often other-directed, as in the title poem, which imagines the later life of this boy with a "metal halo" "bolted into his skull"—a life in which a broken neck turns out to have been "a lucky break." She re-invents myth, again, in "Afternoon with Redón," another ekphrastic poem, in which Galatea is not the victim of Polyphemus, but "like the heartbreaker, / the boy-teaser, the self-pleaser / who only thought to have some fun," and he "like a monster-hearted boy before he buys / his gun." In "Milk Carton Kids," she invents the places and ways children can disappear forever, not even to be found "stuffed / in a trunk" or "dragged from a lake." She asks how "thoughts and prayers go out" in response to a disaster ("Like a loon's / song transmitted by Morse?"), as when "the first plane hit" in 2001. Her metaphors and similes are fresh and exact. "At night bugs came out / and flicked their shells open // like switchblades." ("Pestilence"). They are also compressed, deft, and unsentimental; in “Sago Mine, West Virginia”—about the explosion that killed twelve of thirteen miners—the coal is described as “a black ribbon pinned to / a lapel.”

Greenfield's is often a dire, threatening world seen with a cold, clear eye, a world in which "schools are ever on lockdown behind / chain-link where the mothers cling" ("School Rules"), yet there can be sly amusement in her clear-eyed inventiveness. In "A Vision in Stride Rite," the baby throws his sandal out of the pram, and eats champagne grapes "as he surveys his subjects." The narrator (echoing Allen Ginsberg?), concludes:

                                    Here he is,
Baby Bacchus, making the most
of privilege as his servant
puts her shoulder to the wheel
and shoves on
up the hill.

I admire the strategies of so many of these poems, the way the poet manages their "plots,” or turns them multiple times. In "Morning Coffee with Chagall," she describes a Chagall painting on a coffee cup, a painting in which

The bride and groom lift off
as if their feet were filled with helium, a bouquet of peonies
in her hands, lips locked as if they're
inflating each other like elegant balloons . . . 

The poem only turns neatly toward the self in the third line from the end, when the pronoun "my" deftly enters:  

                           Held aloft, alive--
before their feet touch the ground, before dishes
need to be done. Before the cup is drained, rinsed
and shut away in the hot spray of my top-of-the-line
machine, caught flying before the gravity
of domestic routine.

I look forward to further work from the accomplished Sonia Greenfield.

-- Judy Kronenfeld

As Voigt is quite a reserved and private person, I am always surprised and delighted by her insight, and her generosity to share herself with the reader. She is intelligent and has a quiet grace about her and through her work. What I appreciate about her poetry is the quiet way in which her poems unfold and reveal themselves: no loud bangs and thrashing metaphors, no hyperbole of language, but a certain knowing that she is at work and in service of the poem. And respectful of her art, the reader, and her subject. Beverly writes often of her upbringing in Pittsburgh. Coming from a large family, many of her poems are of  the reunions, dinners, or get-togethers on the house porch or in a historic restaurant in her home town.  Her closeness to nature, how she walks through the world in wonder of the forests, and what she chooses to see, is a source of great joy to her, and a source of wonderful poetry of the natural world, for us.
                                                                                                                                                            -- Carine Topal

Blue Mother
  
All that long night we hovered,
all of us in the room, watching
her slow retreat. Her feet
so cold, her fingers
going blue.
 
Again and again
she raised her arm, wanting
out, wanting back.
Again and again, I guided it
down to the bed. All the care
she’d given me, repaid
in such a small gift.
 
Blue mother in the bed--
Venus in marble—glowing
down that long hallway. Legs
in folds of winding sheets.
One shoulder shrugging off
the world, the other arm
missing, reaching.
 
I think of the apple tree
in blossom whose branch
I’d once pulled toward me.
Whoa, I whispered, when it reared
in the wind. I’ve got you.

                                                                             Beverly Voigt