An Ark of Sorts by Celia Gilbert

Joyce Peseroff recommends
An Ark of Sorts, poems by Celia Gilbert: “A powerful, beautifully written book with a compelling subject. In this delicately shaped series of poems, a mother recalls the passage of a year after the death of a child. An apartment in Paris is first a place of exile, then a place of refuge as the poet, with her family, mourns. Each detail in these vivid poems takes us farther and more poignantly into the city the poems describe and into the place in the heart where the poet lives. ‘ “The art,” says Mademoiselle / “lies in the way you get / from one note to the other,” ‘ Gilbert writes in ‘The Secret’;
An Ark of Sorts evinces that art throughout its sequence of clear images and carefully delineated feeling.” (Alice James)