Rose Mary Boehm

Review by Ruth Bavetta, author of four poetry collections, including No Longer at This Address:

“Upon opening this exceptional book we’re greeted by a throng of extraordinary, sometimes bizarre characters, swooping through the pages in a manner that made me think of Francisco de Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

The old man buys days; dog days,
death days, murderous ones...

We are circling a black hole…
burned wings on the way to the sun.

Then we’re circled back to a more familiar world, one inhabited by a woman of of far-reaching experiences, who falls on the ice, yet as she does, notices

the first
snowdrops pushing out of the frozen
womb, insisting it’s their time.

and who wonders

What If
You get to your afterlife and God
has gone AWOL – visiting his friends downstairs.

Not a summing up of life, but a noticing of what comes next.

Time to move on.
All that’s left is the letter box,
leaning forward like an old, broken man.”

WHISTLING IN THE DARK WHISTLING IN THE DARK

Dip into this book anywhere to find a glittering gem formed out of compressed language. The collection is small but its range, like that of the whales in its title poem, is vast, from the perturbations of love, the dark secrets of hotel beds, the agonies of wing-clipped angels, to the crucial role that beetles, those ‘colonizers of death, always first to arrive at a crime scene,’ play in assisting forensic entomologists. Quirky, brilliant, funny—the intelligence at work here is impressive. I'm reminded of Szymborska. But Rose Mary Boehm has staked a beguiling, seductive claim on the English language that is all her own.

—George Bilgere, Author of Blood Pages

Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?: poems from a sun-bleached folder Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?: poems from a sun-bleached folder