Close at Hand

Bridging the gap in the broken year of the pandemic, poets Susan Chiavelli and Frances Davis exchange short personal reflections on the passage of time, a world beyond reach, and lives fully lived in the attenuated spaces of a locked-down year. Focused on the natural world of their surroundings, their verses, part daily mindfulness and part introspection, celebrate the uplifting power of nature.

When reading Susan Chiavelli and Frances Davis's Close at Hand: A Conversation in Verse it's hard not to think of Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison's Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. Both books feature short poems, often centered in the natural world, in a back and forth that highlights the strengths of each poet involved in the dialogue. What's remarkable is how well Chiavelli and Davis's poetry stands up in comparison with the literary legends who preceded them. Indeed, for my money, the poems in Close at Hand are every bit as vivid as the work in Braided Creek, and at times even more poignant. There's a complex, sometimes bewildering but always unforgettable world in this little book, a volume no serious reader of poetry will want to be without.

-David Starkey, author of You, Caravaggio

  and The Moon Shall Not Give Her Light