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As If This Did Not Happen Every Day
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions ISBN: 978-1-962405-03-4 Available HERE through the publisher Paula J. Lambert moves forward from the mostly-bird-oriented poems she’s has been working on for years, focusing here on a wider array of species to tell a story largely of the feminine. Often victimized, in all kinds of ways—overwhelmed, hunted, and displaced—salvation, if it is to be had, is not in mimicking the patriarchal, searching for some kind of dominance. Grace lies within the larger, divine concept of a collective feminine. “I know you know what it feels like,” the speaker of one poem tells the reader. We live in a world overgrown, overpopulated, diseased, surreal, wild. Fish fall from the sky, birds crash into skyscrapers, and invasive species—in their own attempt to survive—take over every space they find themselves in. Even in our best attempts to help, things fall apart: “We who’ve lived long enough…multiply every problem we’ve inherited.” What’s left, asks the author, but to watch it happen? Praise for As If This Did Not Happen Every Day “How we love to know things,/…kill things,” writes the poet in this gritty and irreverent collection. The everyday for Lambert is what we acknowledge it to be but don’t wish to admit: a cycle of life and death, predators and prey, that we humans dominate. But the deeper wisdom of this book lies in the tender strength of its observation. Like the poems of Mary Oliver before her, Lambert’s praise the world even while implicating us in the great catastrophe of living. —Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby In her collection As If This Did Not Happen Every Day, Paula J. Lambert displays her wide and intense observation and knowledge of nature and her equally strong empathy with many creatures – from birds, including often starlings, to whales. She has a strong ecological underpinning to her poems. They are thoughtful and strong. Through her, we enter the consciousness of many animals. —Marge Piercy Paula J. Lambert’s poems are remarkable for their generosity of spirit and ability to find solace in a fractured world. She combines the extraordinary with the mundane—of course a whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and beats eight times a minute. In this book you will find whales, pythons and fish (no loaves) and of course birds, always birds—murmurations of starlings and sparrows that come on a mission. These poems resonate with empathy for the natural world as we struggle to find our place in it, and in the process, she shows us how to nourish one another. —Cathryn Essinger, author of The Apricot and the Moon |