"One deep dream /disgorges us/ into the faithful
light"… In The Night Heart Knows Every
Word, the poet emerges from real sleep into startling insight, probes
memory and ancient myth to find the future and rises out of the fog of
illusion toward heart-rending loss. Sharon Leiter's compelling images and
language in these poems take us on an intimate journey as the poet questions
and confronts life's irony until we arrive with her at grateful celebration
of all of our travails and encounters. "You and I lived in the Garden
of Remission./… In the desert sand was ever on our tongues,/ but sometimes
a feast of hope/ fell from the extravagant sky."
--Roselyn Elliott,
author of The Separation of Kin
The lyrics in Sharon Leiter's The
Night Heart Knows Every Word are nocturnal, dreamlike, stalked by loss
and a restless, storied nostalgia, and suffused with feist and dark humor
("Sixty is the new forty, they say / to which I say bull / to which
I say if only"). They speak to us from aftermath and a coming to terms
with the truth that "what you cannot reach / has no address beyond
/ what your heart left behind," ("Lost City 101"). Moved
by the engine of a stalwart, steadfast heart, these poems open out redemptively,
"into the vanished / gesture of stretching // . . . provoking the
rigid / skeptical palms to curl forward again // making a shallow / chalice
for gathering / water, a valley where / the wanderer lies down // a cradle
for the wind."
--Lisa Russ Spaar,
author of Blue Venus
In The Night Heart Knows Every Word, Leiter recites
elegies for the days, cities, homes, dreamscapes, and the loved ones who
appear from the poems' familiar doorways to fill each passage with meaning.
The collection is a clear-eyed and tender re-gathering of spirit in the
midst of a gathering darkness.
--Kevin McFadden,
author of Hardscrabble