The Willow Grove

Finalist for the Pulitzer 1997

Laurie Sheck interweaves the contemporary with the mythic, creating a realm in which such things as radios, skyscrapers, expressways, and mannequins are at once familiar and strange; immediate, yet tinged with the light of distance and myth. It is a realm where faces on a television newscast disappear “into the undertow / of hunger for the next thing and the next,” and mannequins “stand in their angelic armor.”

Placed at intervals throughout these pages is a series of poems entitled “From The Book of Persephone,” poems that explore the underworld through a fractured contemporary lens, depicting it as a psychological landscape of isolation and desire.

As Mona Van Duyn said of Laurie Sheck’s previous book, Io at Night, “When her sensibility and the reverberating myth are in perfect conjunction, the extraordinary happens: the mythical figure enters the poet’s imagination so consumingly that it is impossible to tell whose life, whose feelings fill the form on the page.”

Praise & Reviews

“Sheck …can reach moments of lyrical intensity that remind us of Sylvia Plath…And not since Plath has anyone used myth in such a potent way.”
—Michael Collier, Partisan Review 

“Her lines are fluid and seductive, the images powerful and arresting, and the voice insistent…This is a poet who sees beauty and danger as parallel forces, and senses, with some dread the fragility of our human arrangements.”
—Suzanne Matson, Harvard Review

“The poems interconnect so deeply that the book is nearly one poem… A common spirit rises so directly from these poems’ source that it is nearly invisible on first reading. But it is essential, and rises through them as water through trees….The language ..is confident and accurate, its images tracking reality with utmost care…The Willow Grove is dark, and so is our age.”
—Pamela Alexander, The Boston Book Review