Torohill

Poetry of loss, irony, love, memory, and geography, with honesty, humor, sensuality and playfulness of language -- these are modern poems which are not the garden variety -- Reis has an experienced voice.

Donna Reis' gift for mapping the irony, hurt, love and loss of her geography is given its best expression in TOROHILL. Firmly rooted in the real, the collection is ever mindful of the unseen, the super real presiding over human frailty, knowing [we could be taken] at any moment, and . . . the stars wouldn't say a word. And while deer, fox, owls, and coyotes inhabit the woods and fields of the ancestral farm that lends the book its title, they are out-numbered by ghosts that walk in soft swales of lawn where No one notices you let yourself in--[as you follow] the sound of a radio broadcasting in an office--FDR? Even the poet's ghost is here--hit by a car at the base of the driveway at seventeen. Is the location of Reis' life-defining auto accident at the foot of the drive to her future husband's home unimaginable coincidence or illusion? It is Real! as is the brilliance of the words on the page, imbued with Reis' characteristic wit, that give order in Torohill to life's seemingly unassuageable tragedy.--Janet Hamill

Each poem in this well-wrought collection acts as a memory-crumb in a trail through a landscape of leave-takings; sadly, the trail ends in a series of beautifully restrained poems about the death of Reis' husband. While the predominant theme may be loss, Reis' sense of humor and her playfulness with language fill the poems with life.--Teresa Carson

'Make it honest, ' a poetry teacher once urged, and Donna Reis' poems perfectly embody both the honesty and the making of this imperative. Out of wreck and ruin, out of the breaks and pains that constitute the tragic comedy of our ordinary lives, Reis crafts poems of extraordinary tenderness and resilience, which are grounded in an abiding love. These are poems made to savor and to share.--Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Poetry.