Elizabeth Macklin

A Woman Kneeling in the Big City

Elizabeth Macklin is a poet of the city. Her subjects are everywhere: inside apartment houses and alongside towering buildings, on streets and sidewalks, or beneath them, at the water's edge and in the changing heavens. In her able hands, through her painterly eye and rich vision, the odd scraps of urban life are converted into a sort of Platonic dialogue of fruitful enigmas, paradoxes, and playful epiphanies.

"Deft and exact— [Elizabeth Macklin] opens and shapes her poems as perfectly and calmly as time opens the leaves of a tree. And Ms. Macklin has, along with her lyrical gift, the gift of high purpose. She does not dazzle with the banners of language, but doggedly pursues the revelations of meaning within the events of the poems. . . . [A] fine, first book."—Mary Oliver

"Exeptionally fine . . . Macklin's style of rendering abstractions, including emotions, into the facts of the physical world . . . is wonderfully and peculiarly her own."—April Bernard, New York Newsday