Glacier
Fire, Poems by Martha Vertreace-Doody
No title better expresses
the cool elegance, smoldering emotional depth, and imposing formal architecture
of Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody’s poetry than her latest:
Glacier Fire. These poems are
the strongest additions yet to Vertreace-Doody’s increasingly substantial
body of work.
Sample Poems by Martha Vertreace-Doody
“Glacier Fire asks you
to read with the ear both composer and musician attend to music—who
but Martha Vertreace-Doody will rhyme-riff a sestina’s repeating
word us, with rosettes, musk, tulips, and the repeating word one with
numbers two, three, clear down to the seventh day in the poem’s
coda? These poems weave a bliss of language until you are like the bridge
scaler in ‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ ‘a brown-striped / spider
webbed in candles of black pine,’ touched to flame by their music.”—Lucia
Cordell Getsi
“In Glacier Fire, Martha
Modena Vertreace-Doody reveals her deft touch as a cartographer of the
human heart. She maps ‘the known world’ that we move through
and that moves inexorably through us, rife with the flora and fauna of
daily life become suddenly exotic. Both celestial and earthly, American
and Celtic, this collection’s various locales bristle with things
rising and things falling—bread rising in the kitchen and meteors
blazing across the night sky. Hers is a welcome and mature vision, honoring
equally endings and beginnings, the beloved dead and the pleasures of
newlyweds’ marital bed. In sum, this book’s chorus of voices
offers a litany of heartfelt aphorisms, the poet’s collective wisdom
to live and die by.”—Kevin Stein
A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody
is Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kennedy-King
College, Chicago, IL. Her several books include Second House from the Corner, Under a Cat’s-Eye
Moon, Oracle Bones, Cinnabar, Smokeless Flame, Kelly in the Mirror, Maafa:
When Night Becomes a Lion, and Dragon Lady: Tsukimi. Light Caught Bending and Second Mourning, published by Diehard Publishers,
Edinburgh, won Scottish Arts Council Grants. Named the Glendora Review
Poet, Lagos, Nigeria, she was twice a Fellow at the Hawthornden International
Writers’ Retreat in Scotland. Eastern Washington University chose
her as Poetry Fellow, in residence at the Writers Center, Dublin, Ireland.
She was a Fellow at St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, Wales, on a
bursary. She has poems in Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century
Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Poets of the
New Century (David R. Godine Publisher, 2001). Her most recent Pushcart
nomination was for "When Pockets Held Dreams,: published in After
Hours: the Chicago Journal of Writing and Art. She lives in Chicago
with her husband, Tim, and their cats, Bon-Bon and Fred.
ISBN 1932339590, 120 pages, $17.00