‘Psalms of survival’

March 23, 2014

Many thanks to Martin Achatz, an editor at Passages North, for this review of Hold Still in his Saint Marty blog. An excerpt:

“These poems are a testament to anger and humor, despair and joy. They are psalms of survival. Breast cancer. Childhood. Motherhood. Hurricanes. Godbey’s insights are razor-sharp, cutting open the reader’s heart and pumping it full of music and hope. … In the middle of a long winter of heartbreak and ruin, her poems push through the impossibly frozen ground, unfolding petal by petal, syllable by syllable, into the promise of spring.”

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“Terry Godbey’s Hold Still finds its center of gravity in the poet’s experience with breast cancer. These finely made poems trace the narrative arc of illness—moving from the shock of diagnosis through treatment to the aftermath of survival, ‘everything alive,/ even hope.’ Keenly aware that there is ‘much to measure’ in this world, Godbey reminds us that one of poetry’s highest purposes is to revise trauma, and in her lines, ‘find what will save’ us." – Claudia Emerson
Photo by Judy Watson Tracy
Terry Godbey’s full-length book, Hold Still, was published in March 2014 by Main Street Rag, and she’s the author of three previous poetry collections, Flame, Beauty Lessons and Behind Every Door. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Harpur Palate, Passages North, CALYX, Pearl, Slipstream and other literary magazines. She lives in Orlando, Fla., and works as a writer at Darden Restaurants. More…
“Terry Godbey’s poems are carefully deployed, personally revealing, and shamelessly boy-crazy. In the best of them, she leads the reader through the doors of adolescence and into the house of poetry.” — Billy Collins

‘Psalms of survival’

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