I Went Looking For You by Ruth Lepson

Pure and graceful and deep: it takes much time to come to those three. Here they are. Fragile and objective, the view of the world from here. It is how a person sees when looking. Very clear.

—Fanny Howe

These wonderful poems by Ruth Lepson are deeply felt meditations on family, friends,   lovers, the people she “can’t leave behind.”   The book begins with poems about places, mainly Swampscott, Massachusetts, a town on the ocean that she loves to visit.   “Time Line” then makes something like a drawing out of the past, and “Function Theory” suggests a sort of mathematical model of a girl’s thought processes.   These are followed by several delicate poems about Ruth’s aging parents and others about deceased friends.   This private world is then enlarged, often with humor, to include strangers both overheard and seen, as well as works of art.   These are the “things I can name” out of which she makes her life.   The last half of the book is a tender and perceptive series of poems about love that persists across disconnections, loss, and time.   Idyllic and dissonant scenes are recalled. Dreams prolong the dissolved relationships. And finally, the dreamer wakes up “surrounded with life.”

— Joel Sloman

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her books of poetry are Morphology , a collaboration with artist Rusty Crump, of photographs and prose poems (blazeVOX, 2007) and Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books). She edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (Univ. of Illinois Press). Her writing has appeared in Carve, Jacket, EOAGH, Shampoo, Agni, Harvard Review and other magazines, and she has read at the Bowery Poetry Club and La Mama Galleria in New York, on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and at many other places. In recent years she has been collaborating with musicians, and her jazz & poetry group, low road, performs and has a CD forthcoming. She organized poetry readings for Oxfam America.

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