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Praise for The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize: Art and artists—including her beloved Wyeths—permeate Catherine Staples’s first collection as subject matter. But it is her own artistry, and her appreciation of the art of the ordinary, that is its hallmark. With their memorable images, plain speech, even Frostian tones, some of these poems have the sheen of parables being as they are, as in her account of Clark’s field, the result of thought and ‘second thought.’ Lessons are earned, learned and recorded. “The way seals ride an incline...you know they’re dreaming the sea.” She gives us “a morning where everything goes on / as before, but nothing’s the same”….I have admired Staples’s work a dozen years or more. More than that, I’ve trusted it fully. She is one of the good. - Peter Fallon Praise for Never a Note Forfeit winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize: There is an elegance of rhythm, astute observation of the natural world, a grace of metaphor in which landscape is transformed into emotional geography...The narrative is never overbearing but rather allowed to emerge and recede through the series. While a loved one's life is at stake, that emotional drama is played out in tension with the beauty and ephemeral nature of landscape .... - Betsy Scholl Catherine Staples grew up in Dover Massachusetts and still spends part of each summer on Cape Cod. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Prime Number, and Quarterly West among other journals. Honors include the University of Pennsylvania's William Carlos Williams Award, the New England Poetry Club's Boyle/Farber Award, and the Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Prize. She teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University and lives with her family in Devon, Pennsylvania. Please click on book covers for links to The Ashland Poetry Press and Seven Kitchens Press. |
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