Osier, Jill: From

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Fromby Jill Osier (Bull City Press, paperback)

Publication Date: July 3, 2018

Publisher Marketing:Poetry. Jill Osier, winner of the 2017 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, returns to Bull City Press with a new chapbook.

“These poems shine with the deep intelligence of gentleness and of a quiet, sustained concern. To read them is to be reminded of Robert Creeley’s passionate advocacy of Hart Crane, a passion that reached crescendo in the exclamation (in a letter to Charles Olson) ‘Dammit, isn’t that gentle!’ Here is a poet whose primary commitment is to attention, a poet who simultaneously understands and avows that attention is now and ever shall be the vivid prime of Love. I neither blush nor hesitate to say that such avowal is literally angelic. This poet’s ‘Requiem’ gently but unequivocally proposes point-of-view as an angelic imperative, gentle on its very face: ‘Try / to remember the smell of sun through it all. It’s / a rare courtship.’ Love courts attention, and attention in return is both courted and empowered by love. The upshot? ‘There was a beating / of silence then, until it was a new quiet…’ It is the bright substance of this ‘new quiet’ I am happy to welcome and to acknowledge. It is surely the peaceable frontier of joy.”Donald Revell