Overview

"Sauci Churchill's Quiet . . . Collected Poems brings us into a compelling voice that is distinctive in its presence, whether joyous, sad, tender, comic, reflective, or fearful. Whatever the subject, the poems are like lyric conversations, be they memories of growing up on Chicago's streets in the 1940s and 50s; of the world about her - bats, for instance, ""lie in dark places / our pulse pounds in fright // Help us to love them""; of religious belief - ""I never had religion but/ revered the fine grain of wood / polished it with my soft rag to shine""; of travel,"" in ""My First Time in Paris"" ""Pont Neuf, hidden in shadows is wrapped. / Domes emerge and the city begins to dazzle;"" and then of pain, which Sauci had much of and wrote about in the most evocative of ways: ""Washed in the moon's brightness / pain, like the night sky, is vast."" And, the poetry she wrote when she was dying stands by itself, particularly her last words, from which the title of the collection comes, prompted by a trapped sparrow in her porch: "" Quiet.... /That frightened sparrow/ could have been my heart."" The understated elegance of all these embracive poems is a welcoming invitation to share in their intimacy. This book was made possible, in part, by donations to the FLP's ONE LAST WORD Program. ONE LAST WORD helps to bring the last works of gifted poets to the world. We are honored to be publishing her last work."

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Reviews

"This elegant, intelligent, and deeply moving collection of poems is aptly named. Sauci Churchill's lyricism is indeed, quiet, and all the more powerful for it. She finds miracles in the smallest things -a tiny harmonica, a white lace collar, even the blink of an eye-and builds exquisite shrines of poetry round them. That hush in her voice reminds us that everything, seen properly, is part of a sacred whole. What a blessing this book is. -Rose Solari, author of The Last Girl (poetry) and A Secret Woman (a novel) It is good to have Sauci Churchill's early work and later poems brought together here. Her poems have long been marked by a unique combination of delicacy and toughness, reticence and candor. The poems she wrote between her diagnosis with ALS and her death in 2011 add moments of angry humor and astonishing beauty. ""I lay down/in the whitest of snow,"" she writes. ""later that evening/ a small red fox/ sniffs my face/ and moves on."" -Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence, Memos from the Broken World, and The Music of Being Sauci Churchill's poems are quiet marvels-this is not hyperbole. Her seemingly simple diction and concreteness of line, whether writing of childhood memories in Chicago (Running Down Division Street) or traveling in Jamaica and Croatia, or in meditations on sorrow and pain-which ""like the night sky, is vast / Twinkling, it seems to come and go / but is steadfast like the north Star""-or in comic self-deprecation, the poems from one to the next have a luminesce about them: ""Who's to say on a shining summer evening/ with my planet or star ascending / and my clothes strewn about / that I cannot dance/in the privacy of /the moon's light / just as I am / as I am."" The poems of Quiet have a singular voice-you cannot help lingering amidst their warm companionability. -Merrill Leffler, author of the poetry collection, Mark the Music"

Author Information

Sauci Sharon Churchill was born in 1940 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. After earning a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, she did graduate work at UC Berkeley. She went on to serve as a government law librarian in Washington, D.C., retiring after 30 years. Sauci lived with her husband, Bruce Butterworth and their shelter dog, Cloud, in Bethesda, Maryland. In November 2010, she was diagnosed with ALS, and died seven months later on June 11, 2011. She is lovingly remembered by Bruce, her daughter Devorah Churchill, and many others. Quiet..., which Bruce has edited, brings together all of Sauci's life-loving and distinctive poetry.

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