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Critical Praise for Fully Into Ashes

• You will not read a better, stranger book this year. -- Andrew Hudgins

  For those who, as Sofía Starnes puts it, "hazard holiness," the world, which must be loved, also requires a strange and luminous patience that her poems celebrate and embody, sometimes impatiently, as they seek the numinous: "It is as though a household knocker rapped: Keep close to home; / Keep home. As if a distant continent crept into my room." Her challenging lyrical explorations echo Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but her voice is all her own--jazzy, lyrical, acerbic, and mystical: "A child is what she is; // not the day, / not the doubt my word careens against-- // There I go now, forgetting." You will not read a better, stranger book this year.

  — Andrew Hudgins, author of Ecstatic in the Poison, After the Lost War, and others.

• The language in this book is antic, driven by smart, syncopated rhythms. Sofia Starnes's poems are flagrant with the stuff of the real world--all the body's rich pleasures. In and through that physical reality moves another world, a world of spirits. It is as if the poems release other, more subtle, nuanced, shadowy presences and the two realities render one another more palpable. Fully Into Ashes is a major accomplishment.

  — Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling

• "I'm dreaming up identities," writes Sofia Starnes in the poem "Awash," which reads both as an ars poetica and a keynote for her lyrical and sensual new collection. Who was the first to do that, to dream up identities? Was it God or Adam? Language is a holy gift, as the poems in this marvelous book demonstrate. And there isn't a poet of faith worth reading, from Solomon to John Donne, who doesn't marry sensuality to religious belief. Starnes is part of that great tradition.

  — Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

Reviews

• New Starnes collection blends spiritual, physical

  San Antonio Express-News04/24/2011

  "Sofia Starnes' subtle lyrics are hushed ceremonies of spiritual awakening — as slowly as wisdom. The soul sweet-talks/its way into the throng/of lung, ribcage, hip. The lips/are doorsill, in and out;/I do not know which-way./What kills a rose? But this climactic instant of beauty is not a death since the rose bush lives on in thorny branches and the classic image resonates in memory. Distances ends with a wasted whiff that strikes/heart, a little beyond. Beyond the commonsense reality we all whiff.

  As in her third collection, Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh (2008 Whitebird Award, Wings Press), Fully Into Ashes maps an open landscape where both the spiritual and the physical are intimately wed. These poems evoke the holy spirits in nature toward the divine elevation of all that is real. Never sanctimonious, their religious roots and humble saints inhabit a poetic garden flowering with a second innocence.

  Listen to the voice of The House That Spoke: Here is a task to undertake—/let's build a house out of a sigh,/to be, through memory, a language: brick-work,/brick-word, rumors from swung rattan,//spelling out our tales./And the sigh will be the rust stain on the wall,/a pipe's great story which we failed to hear/in summer patches. Romantic perhaps but not sentimental. Her original images create a fresh awareness of human experience — in part, as Starnes says, because I consider belief to be experience.

  The book's three parts, intricately integrated, fell into three clear stages, Starnes says, and ah, once more that intriguing and illuminating trinity. These are apt words to characterize her poetry: intriguing and illuminating (and insightful, to make a trinity). Her artist's statement about the three parts reads: There is —Find'; that is, the initial awareness of whatever life proffers. Then, there is —Ache,' our growing experience of loss and longing, both of which define us. And ultimately, there is —Gift,' when what becomes clear to us is that we are most often on the receiving end, having paid no price to equal its worth, of all that is Good. Through continuous stages of discovery and suffering and bounty, we feel the sweet sense of wise mercy.

  Aside from one six-page narrative, the texts roam between 20 and 50 lines, never wandering aimlessly. Their graceful rhythms, even when quirky, remind of Dickinson; their music echoes classical Spanish guitar solos; their shapes reflect paintings that inspire her (Goya, Donatello, Boucher). Yet comparative speculations are relatively meaningless in light of her meaningful words. Two elegies for her parents recall their earthly things. The Scarf ends when her father tucks/a white luminous robe around himself—/not crowned, not wept—/a small verb: merely dozing. The Armoire — dense as a thicket — reveals its overlap of living/things on things thought lifeless. Yet her mother's possessions persist luminously because she leaves them for us.

  An earlier poem of a girl now grown with a liturgy of ghosts ends: Loss is an old but ample word for ghost;/prize is the better word for angel (Lola's Window). Such lines thematically connect the book's vision. Look! exclaim the last lines of The Monument Restorer: Full are the man and the field, /full are we under the sun.

  Starnes' poetry has been published widely, won awards, and has been acclaimed by Billy Collins, Andrew Hudgins and others. Fully Into Ashes stands as a true book of poetry, not a mere collection of poems. It deserves wide attention from serious readers and lovers of contemporary poetry."

  The San Antonio Express-News

  Copyright Robert Bonazzi, 2011.

• emailMay 18, 2011

            Oh, the fret of a poem
  and its motions, why
  
  a memory extends it, why
          it seeks out the half-verse,
  the half-world,
  alit and afloat all at once,
  the half-amorous
  mock, and the cocked ear encircling
  some forgotten
          occurrence.
  A migration of losses flocks
  over the page: pinpoint deaths—
  
           And the word that was wander
  and rest
  is now Thing.
  
                          from "The Fret of Memory"
                          Sofia M. Starnes
  
  Sofia Starnes' meditations in Fully Into Ashes spin a tangle and tumble of language, mystery and strangeness, glossolalian-tongued syntax fashioned through a glass darkly, diction peeled and pared ("Migrations"), "the heart's abundant feast" ("Leaving Pompeii") set not for all, but for those with ears to translate the hum of wings treading air, a stirring of waters, mourning of dove and day. This is a book to be read at one sitting if you can, awash in verb and noun and "marbled, eeling" ("Waters") adjectives "hazarding holiness" ("Waters"), echoing "the hang of a vanishing truth" (The Fret of Memory"), almost knowable.

                         — Prof. Robert A. Fink, Hardin-Simmons University

  Blest be the word at stake, the universe of stars,
  
                               articulate as childbirth.
  
                             from "A Way Through Words"
                             Sofia M. Starnes
  

• Midwest Literary ReviewJune 2011

  There are many questions you can ask of faith, and those questions are the questions asked by Sofia Starnes. Fully Into Ashes is her collection of poetry that seeks spirituality, identity, and faith, and how they all come together into one. With distinctive verse, Fully Into Ashes is an excellent collection that embraces its unusual nature. "River Saint": "We cannot ask/for resting place, or wish/for apse in church;/the martyr's eye, serene//as stone, forgot to claim/a grotto when we heaved and/hauled this Santo out of mud./We went half-mad--//the sight of it;/quick, Santo, Santo, pour/your blessings on our banks."