PANGAEA Reviews: Always Looking Back

Keating girl
© Patrick Keating

BOOK REVIEWS

Nancy Keating is an amazing, emerging poet. Her work evokes images so clearly that I was made to feel as if I were the �fly on the wall,� taking in the scene being played out before me. Throughout her work there is a voice one cannot ignore, at times a whisper and at other times a shout, but always is Nancy�s voice heard. I found myself gong from poem to poem drawn to press on, discover what next the poet had to show me. I highly recommend this volume of verse for anyone who has longed, loved, lost, and/or conquered.

Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Suffolk County (NY) Poet Laureate

Nancy Keating's poems are a breath of fresh air, clever, carefully constructed, constantly presenting us with significant details of not just her life but our own. She may be demure in her own praise, as in the poem �It Is the Trance of Knowing,� but her lines themselves give us �the comprehension of owls,/the Braille of the lover.�

David B. Axelrod, Laureate and Fulbright Poet

Like Seamus Heaney in his signature poem �Digging,� Keating is after more precious stuff than is to be found in the mere soil of her garden . . .. She�s looking to unearth the authentic, the sinuous, the germinal�bring them to the surface and examine them, moment by moment. In poem after generous poem she does so. This book is a generous act of sharing. Like the beloved family pets in �Cabinet of Imperfect Memory,� the poems leap up off the page, �free of doubt.�

George Wallace, First Suffolk County Poet Laureate

Nancy Keating is like her poetry: �a dreaming city, soft with hard surfaces,� �silk and chocolate and lace and stone,� �like some ghost/your voice in my ear.� All lines I wish I had written. This first collection is fearless, intelligent and touching. Poems to be read and re-read.

Barbara Reiher-Meyers