Poetry Book
New Title
"QUIVER" is in print
Now available from Small Press Distributions.
spdbooks.org
Amazon.com
Publisher: Tebot Bach
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BOOK REVIEWS
Book epigraph by Gerard De Nerval: "Look around you, everything quivers with being."
Sharon Carter’s poems reveal an astonishing sensibility, a voice that probes the intimate life of the body — personal, cultural, history itself — with the exactness of a scalpel. The heart stutters on, she tells us, and she would know. As a physician, she became attuned to the crack and groan of the human body: illness and death rising like birdsong from the throat; women in labor; fissures on an iced-over lake like the blight of a mammogram. Her meditations are nuanced, droll, clear sighted; alert to the marvels of the earth and its ruin; layered with bravado, bees, and longing. Women do this, she affirms: deliver babies, make poems, resurrect the dead. I find myself standing back with admiration. “May light from the farthest galaxy/arrive before too long,” she writes. Amen. —KATHRYN HUNT, author of a "Long Way Through Ruin" and "Seed Wheel"
Sharon Carter’s poems honor the fragility of our flesh, our bones and our psyches. Whether about treating a young boy’s infected finger (“A red line reaches for his armpit/For his life”) or considering blame (On winter nights when coyotes sob/ among the pines/and the moon never rises”), about a loss in pregnancy (“How to be grateful for what is/than struggle over what never was”), or footsteps (“our footsteps clatter in couplets”), they are masterfully astute and, above all, honest. Sharon Carter’s collection displays the feat of a fine poet who meets one’s life on its own terms and reaches in to evoke the universal human experience. —SHEILA BENDER, author of "A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief"
About
I grew up in a previously flourishing Lancashire seaside resort. I worked various part time jobs from age fourteen, the least favorite being a chamber maid. Art and chemistry were my favorite subjects at high school. Benefitting from free British education I studied medical sciences, attending Cambridge University and London's St Mary's Hospital medical school. I trained first in family practice then in psychiatry, attracted to its unique challenges.
I immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970's moving to Washington state to raise two daughters. I decided to stay. I've worked for non-profits during my career and recently retired from a part-time volunteer medical position.
Early on I traveled extensively on a shoe-string budget while in college, then overland for six months to Afghanistan, Iran, India, Nepal in my late twenties. A staffing post in 2005 on the Semester at Sea circumnavigated the earth. I revisited several countries and witnessed the consequences of population growth and pollution.
The Hedgebrook Foundation and Jackstraw Writers program generously provided valuable experience during my early writing career. Since then I have been a co-editor of an online literary magazine and one of four poets producing a reading series. My visual art and poetry has been accepted in many print magazines and online, including the Raven Chronicles award winning anthology: Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, Strange Fruit, Exhibition, Pontoon, Poetry on the Buses, Ars Medica, Terra Nova, Heliotrope, and The Madrona Project volume 3.
A completed blog exists at: https://sharonmcarter.blogspot.com/ to provide background details and additional visual art related to poems featured in the chapbook. Sometimes poems led to a visual interpretation or the reverse occurred. I hope you enjoy my work.
If you need prompt ideas: Look around you, everything you see quivers with being, the book's epigraph advises. Pay attention.
POEMS
WHEREVER I AM, THERE YOU ARE
Ancient astronomers once thought
Earth center of our universe.
I know now this is untrue—
Mount Tahoma is the constant
heart, suspended
between Heaven and Earth.
When midnight comes, pearl fishers
trawl its black canopy; the moon
concealed in a cratered cloak
studies us with a silver eye.
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BEDDING PLANES, ZION CANYON
Weathered russet, charcoal and bone-
white streaks bleed across the fractured planes
of wind-sculpted rock. Sediments contain
a million years of memory, each stone
pressed against another, like two lovers thrown
together. In the struggle to retain
separate lives, our boundaries are much the same-
in truth we seldom stand alone.
We’ve learned to lean a little for support-
the faults and folds of ingrained habits mean
our edges sometimes aren’t a perfect fit.
Though years of wind and rain distort
the matrix of our lives, the mortar in between
the crack is where our strength exists.
READINGS
Contact
- Olympic Peninsula, Washington, United States
If you need to contact me please fill out the adjacent form and I'll do my best to be prompt.