Praise for Current
The poems in Barbara Carlson’s Current take us under the surface into what lives below and just to the side of the material world. Her words do that miraculous thing of leading us to the edge of the unsayable, a “higher stillness” full of wonder. Carlson can move with the apparent ease of an aerialist from an abandoned nest, to a ruined mansion’s broken windows, to the centuries pressed into rock—each image becoming part of the next and enlarging the whole. This is a book of transformations—not loud splashy ones, but the deeper, more quiet ones that come out of silence and the astute attention that Simone Weil calls prayer, or Carlson herself calls the “windless unseen light that opens us within.” Whether on a Roman street or walking alongside a bog near her home, Carlson gives us a place “for the soul to lie down and be gathered.” In our way too transactional world, these poems are crucial, their currents carry us back to mystery, to the immensity of life, until “whatever it is that separates us fades away.”
–Betsy Sholl author of As if a Song Could Save You
BLESSING A STONE
Stones along the dirt road shine
in quiet hues at dawn.
Their colors deepen
as the smell of light
revives on the moist road.
I pick one up and rub
the striations, as if I could draw
from the lines some message,
some memory of its passage.
Pausing, I close my eyes
and see the stars. I can almost
reach through the light
and dark particles that hold all I am
to know where I’m going.
About the Author
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of three previous books of poetry, What Drifted Here (Cherry Grove 2023), Once in Every Language (Kelsay Books 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse Press 2013). She co-translated with Ana Jelnikar Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel and co-edited with Richard Jackson A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives. She has published poems, translations and articles in the US and abroad. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Carlson is a Poetry in Translation Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. She lives in Carver, Massachusetts.