Reviews
Lisa’s poetry is personal without self-absorbtion, clever without clever, cleverness; her interests lie close to the heart. She writes with the clear eyes and head of an outsider.
-Tobias Hill
In these twelve powerful poems, Lisa Dart’s concern is with the weight of memory and the way it defines self. Uncalled for, memory seems to ‘come, flit land precise//on random things’ so that moments of the past return again and again and become a kind of ‘blueprint of the future’. Dart’s talent is not only an ability to pinpoint such truths, but also to articulate them vividly. And the poems are neither forced nor overly philosophical; instead each presents a stunning moment from a lived life in eloquent langauge that penetrates our own.
- Andrea Hollander Budy
The poems we heard were accessible but not simple; they were based on personal emotion but not confessional; that essayed exquisite yet exact descriptions of nature germane to her themes of love, death, meaning, memory and self; that were modest but with secret ambition to get to you; and that were written in technically accomplished free (mostly) verse. She unfailingly convinces you of her sincerity and of the pressure she feels to mediate experiences; the artifice is in not being aware of the artifice. One of her lines (from “The Hour of the Wolf”) is, ‘the light that startles as it brightens’ : exactly.
- Jeffery Carson