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The beautifully delicate poems in Barbara Germiat’s Look, the Silence are informed by a deftly conveyed sense of loss, but they also contain moments of delicious wit and sudden, unexpected illuminations of joyful light. They make us look more closely. About the book, Laurel Mills has written, “The speaker of the poems in Barbara Germiat’s Look, the Silence finds security in silence. As a child she ‘sat under the piano while / the grownups talked about the war.’ Her silence results in, and springs from, strained family relationships, especially with her mother and later with her own children. Most moving is the way she is struck ‘nearly mute’ by her son’s suicide. She observes that even nature is often quiet: ‘flowers fade and set their seed,’ ‘snow floats down’ outside the sun room window, and ‘evening blushes farewell, indifferent to human longing.’ As readers, we’re glad that the poet broke her silence to gift us with these poems.” And this from Bruce Dethlefsen: “Barbara Germiat’s first book of poems, Look, the Silence, is ripe with carefully crafted, image-rich, and tender memories of farm life in Wisconsin. She remembers the ‘much loved 1930s Philco console’ and how the ‘sunset falls into sky dark / enough that stars may bloom.’ ”
Barbara Germiat spent her childhood on a dairy farm in southeastern Wisconsin, with a much older brother and lots of cows, pigs, chickens, dogs and cats, but no daily playmates. She learned to amuse herself. Reading was a large part of her amusement. Jo March, the “scribbler” of Little Women fascinated her, and after becoming both wife and mother, she began work as a stringer for a local newspaper. When she and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, she worked in the public information office of the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley. It was then that she began studying and writing poetry. Twenty years of writing newsletters for organizations taught her how to condense, a useful skill for a poet. This is her first book of poetry.
Click here for selections from the book. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-1-943826-26-1
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